Alisa Johannsen Rubin Biography

She joined The Times in January 2007 as a correspondent in Baghdad and covered Iraq and Afghanistan, becoming bureau chief in Baghdad in the fall of 2008. She then moved to Afghanistan in October 2009, becoming bureau chief there a couple of months later. She was in Kabul, Afghanistan, for almost four years, leaving in the late summer of 2013 to become Paris bureau chief. She continued, though, to work on projects in Afghanistan and joined the team covering the Islamic State’s takeover of northern and western Iraq in 2014. That August, she was seriously injured and nearly killed in a helicopter crash in Kurdistan, covering the beleaguered Yazidis.

Before joining The Times, she was The Los Angeles Times co-bureau chief in Baghdad, and its bureau chief for the Balkans for five years. She started at that newspaper's Washington bureau in 1997, covering health care policy and financing, abortion politics and legislation, and the fight over tobacco legislation on Capitol Hill.

Before that, she was a reporter for Congressional Quarterly magazine, where she covered health care and then taxes and trade on Capitol Hill. She came to Washington after working for four years as a reporter in Wichita, Kan., for the Knight-Ridder newspaper then known as The Wichita Eagle-Beacon. She covered taxes there as well as the troubled farm economy.

Her career in journalism started at The American Lawyer magazine where she was a researcher. In Washington, she freelanced for The New Republic, The Washington Monthly and The Washington Post’s Outlook section as well as The Washington Post Magazine.

Ms. Rubin was born and grew up in New York City and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1980 from Brown University with an honors degree in Renaissance studies and a minor in classics (Latin). She received a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities to pursue her graduate studies in modern European history, with a focus on the history of the Catholic Church, at Columbia University, where she received an M.A. in 1986.

She won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting; the 2015 John Chancellor Award for journalistic achievement; a 2010 Overseas Press Association award for a piece on women suicide bombers, “How Baida Wanted to Die;” and a 1992 Washington Monthly award for a piece that appeared in the Washington City Paper, “What People Talk About When They Talk About Abortion.”

In 1992 she won an Alicia Patterson Fellowship to report on the medical and religious roots of the abortion controversy in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s 1989 Webster decision. She was twice part of teams that won the National Farm Writers of America Award at The Wichita Eagle-Beacon in 1986 and 1988 for their coverage of farm issues. She also won the William Allen White Award in 1989 for her coverage of Kansas’s overhaul of its real estate taxes. Her college thesis, which was a translation and annotation of some of the letters of Lionardo Bruni, a Renaissance humanist, was published in Allegorica, an academic journal.

Ms. Rubin lives in Paris with her husband, James E. Castello, a lawyer who specializes in international arbitration.

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