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Speakers

Hannah Bloch

Digital Editor, NPR

Hannah Bloch is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist with more than 20 years of experience in the United States and overseas. She is a digital editor for international news at NPR and writes the “Work in Progress” column for The Wall Street Journal. Previously, Bloch was a staff writer and editor at National Geographic, where she authored magazine stories on subjects including archaeology, global health and the role failure plays in exploration. Her September 2015 story covered the challenges in Afghanistan of preserving an ancient Buddhist archaeological site sitting atop one of the world’s biggest copper deposits.

During an 11-year career at Time, she served for six years as the magazine’s first full-time correspondent for Pakistan and Afghanistan, where she covered a wide range of stories including the rise and fall of the Taliban regime, Pakistan’s nuclear tests and violence against women. She was one of a handful of journalists to report from Kabul on September 11, 2001.

Concurrently with her Time assignment, Bloch opened CNN’s bureau in Islamabad and was its first bureau chief. She was a John S. Knight Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and a Freedom Forum Asia Studies Fellow at the University of Hawaii. She speaks Urdu and French.