Miriam Elder is the Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a reporter and editor with particular expertise in Russia, U.S. foreign policy, and gender issues. Her work at CFR focuses on the role of historical memory in the building of sustainable democracies, specifically as it relates to Ukraine.

Ms. Elder worked as a foreign correspondent in Russia from 2002 to 2003 and again from 2006 to 2013, charting the rise of Vladimir Putin first by covering his consolidation of control over Russia’s energy industry for the Moscow Times, and then for the Guardian, where she was Moscow bureau chief. She was the first journalist at an English-language outlet to profile opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the punk-protest group Pussy Riot, and followed the trials against both closely.

In 2013, Ms. Elder became the founding world editor at BuzzFeed News, creating and leading a team of correspondents around the world with focuses on gender, LGBTQ+ issues, tech policy, culture, and more. In 2019, she began covering the reelection campaign of Donald Trump as a senior reporter for BuzzFeed News and became part of a newsroom-wide effort to report on the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, she became an executive editor at Vanity Fair, leading The Hive, the magazine’s hub for politics, tech, and business coverage. She left that position in summer 2022 to pursue independent work, mainly editing nonfiction books on a range of topics, including tech, U.S. politics, and art. In addition to her staff positions, Ms. Elder has been published in New York Magazine, the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and others.

A native New Yorker, Ms. Elder graduated from Barnard College with a BA in women’s studies with a focus on political science, and from the Paul H. Nitze School of International Studies at Johns Hopkins with an MA in international relations with a focus on strategic studies and international economics.