Reporting in the age of Disappearance
Investigative Reporting on Systems Built to Erase
Speaker: Sarah Stillman
Staff writer at The New Yorker and Professor in the Practice at Yale
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
CDS 1750, 6:00 – 7:30PM
Register Livestream
For more than a decade, Sarah Stillman has reported for The New Yorker on the human toll of profiteering—in prisons, jails, immigration detention facilities, and beyond. In her Silas Pierce lecture, she will explore the role that traditional investigative reporting can play in unearthing injustice, while also confronting its limits in a rapidly-shifting media landscape. As information ecosystems grow more siloed—and misinformation more pervasive — Stillman argues that new models of reporting are urgently needed: work that is more collaborative, experimental, and expansive in how it reaches diverse audiences.
Drawing on recent reporting about the Trump Administration’s mass deportations, Stillman will share her interviews with individuals subjected to ICE’s secretive “third-country deportation” program—an effort to deport people to high-risk countries with which they have no prior ties. The lecture asks how investigative journalism can adapt not only to expose hard-won truths in this fast-moving moment, but also, to sustain them—in public memory, in the historical record, and in the lives of the people most affected.
About the Speaker
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose investigative reporting explores how power and profit shape key American systems, including criminal justice, immigration, and climate policy. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the felony-murder doctrine, and her work has exposed the economic incentives embedded in punishment and governance — from debtors’ prisons and civil asset forfeiture to the exploitation of disaster-recovery workers amid the climate crisis. She has documented the human toll of mass deportation across multiple presidential administrations, including, most recently, conducting some of the first interviews with people deported by the Trump Administration to third countries where they had no prior ties and faced indefinite detention.
Stillman teaches journalism as a Professor in the Practice at Yale University, where she also directs the Investigative Reporting Lab, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to collaborative public-interest storytelling. Previously, she ran the Global Migration Project at Columbia Journalism School; her work can be found in the best-selling anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, as well as in multiple Best American Magazine Writing anthologies. She is a MacArthur Fellow.
About Silas Peirce
Silas Peirce (1860-1922) was associated with many businesses and Boston area charitable organizations. The family company, Silas Pierce & Co, which he led, was established by his great uncle in 1815, and the family’s summer home was on property in Scituate, Mass that had been occupied by his family since 1642. Pierce was treasurer of Boston University (1911-1922) and a University Trustee (1899-1922). The Silas Peirce fund was established by Pierce’s heirs with the intention of providing for special lectures at the College. This lecture series was reintroduced at Boston University in 2014 as one of the signature events of the academic calendar, with the intent of bringing the community together across multiple disciplines, including across colleges, through a topic of broad interest to faculty, students, and alumni.
About the Silas Peirce Lecture
The annual Silas Peirce Lecture is open to all fields of inquiry covered in the College of Arts & Sciences, and is designed to represent different fields across the years. These lectures bring our academic community together across multiple disciplines, including colleges, and interest faculty, students, and alumni. Given Silas Peirce’s deep roots in the Boston area, topics of special relevance to this region are welcomed.
Past Lectures
2025
Dani S. Bassett, J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Perry Zurn, Provost Associate Professor of Philosophy, American University: “Curiosity and the Architecture of Thought.”
Watch the lecture
2024
Sergei Guriev, provost and professor of economics, Sciences Po, Paris: “Fighting Misinformation on Social Media.”
2023
Kira Thurman, Associate professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and History, University of Michigan: “On Beethoven, Blackness, and Belonging: Debating German Music Across the Black Atlantic”
Watch the lecture
2022
Melissa Moore, “Exploring the Science of mRNA”
2021
Jennifer Eberhardt, “Biased–Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do”
2020
Michael Bravo (University of Cambridge), “The Polar Garden of Eden: Voyages into Mythology and Ethnonationalism”
2019
Laura Dassow Walls (University of Notre Dame), “Henry David Thoreau’s Legacy of Resistance & Hope”
2018
Dell Upton (UCLA), “Black Liberation & White Supremacy: Commemorating the African-American Past in the Shadow of the Confederacy”
2017
Bill James, “The Arts and Sciences of Baseball”
2016
David Fischer (Brandeis University), “The Enduring Creativity of Afro-European Cultures in America”
2015
Tali Mendelberg (Princeton University), “The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, and Institutions”
2014
Bethany Ehlmann (California Institute of Technology), “Following the Water on Mars: Roving with Curiosity”
Arts & Sciences Endowed Lecture Series Nomination Form
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