Bowdoin Announces 2026 Honorary Degree Recipients

Evan Gershkovich is a journalist at The Wall Street Journal and a member of the Class of 2014. Gershkovich, who had been living and working in Russia for six years, most recently working out of the WSJ's Moscow bureau, was imprisoned in Russia for more than a year after he was detained by Russia's Federal Security Service in March 2023 on unsubstantiated charges of espionage. This marked the first time since the Cold War that a journalist working for an American news outlet had been arrested on charges of spying. In July 2024, despite declarations by the White House and WSJ that he was not involved in espionage and was being "wrongfully detained," Gershkovich was sentenced to sixteen years in prison. He was released on August 1, 2024, as part of a prisoner exchange, which some say had been the Russian government's end goal all along. Four months after his release from captivity, Gershkovich and three of his WSJcolleagues published an article that shined a spotlight on the Department for Counterintelligence Operations, known as DKRO, the secretive Kremlin agency that arrested him and reported to be "at the very core of Putin's wartime regime." Gershkovich's memoir, This Cursed Beautiful Land: A Russian-American Story, chronicling his time in prison and Russia's move toward autocracy, is to be published by Crown Publishing, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and will be available September 29, 2026. A philosophy major and English minor at Bowdoin, Gershkovich worked for The New York Times from 2016 to 2017, The Moscow Times from 2017 to 2020, and Agence France-Presse from 2020 to 2022 before moving to the WSJ in January 2022. In 2024, Gershkovich was awarded the National Press Foundation's Chairman's Citation, which recognizes individuals whose accomplishments fall outside the traditional categories of excellence but who nevertheless have a profound impact on journalism, and the Radio Television Digital News Association Foundation's First Amendment Award, honoring those who "practice, promote, and defend journalism." He was also named one of TIME's "100 Most Influential People," appearing on the magazine's March 25, 2024, cover.