Julia Shipley, '20 M.A. Arts & Culture, Named 2024 Tony Horwitz Fellow

With this award, Shipley will present, discuss and contextualize efforts to re-limb America's authentic family tree.

July 16, 2024

Julia Shipley, '20 M.A. Arts & Culture, has been awarded the 2024 Tony Horwitz Fellowship. With this award, Columbia Journalism School will fund and support her investigation into the legacy of enslavement of African Americans by White Quaker families in Pennsylvania. 

"Her Ancestor Owned His Ancestor: the Reckoning and Legacy of Quaker Enslavement and Lost Philadelphians," was a finalist for the 2024 New York University Reporting Award. Shipley will continue to work on this project as a Tony Horwitz Fellow.

Using the discoveries of the Howard University-339 & Beyond project — a first-of-its-kind effort to recover and restore Black family records for people formerly enslaved by Quakers — Shipley will present, discuss and contextualize efforts to re-limb America's authentic family tree.

In preparation for her investigation, she immersed herself in the physical locations of enslaved people by visiting plantations, combing through materials in 13 different archives, attending dozens of reparations meetings and interviewing the descendants of the enslavers and the enslaved. 

“I am steeped in this subject matter,” Shipley said.


Shipley is a freelance arts & culture investigative reporter, fact checker, and correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was a Columbia Journalism Investigations Fellow in 2021, a Boston University Religion and Environment Story Fellow in 2022, and she was a co-recipient of the Joan Konner Fellowship in 2022. 

Her work has been supported by Type Investigations and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. Long-form features reported by Shipley have appeared in GRIST, Hyperallergic, Mother Jones, NPR, Rolling Stone and WIRED. 

The Tony Horwitz Fellowship honors the late Tony Horwitz (1958–2019), a 1983 graduate of the Master of Science Program and winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for his work at The Wall Street Journal. Horwitz authored more than a half dozen books, including the New York Times Best Sellers "Confederates in the Attic," "Blue Latitudes," "Baghdad Without a Map" and "A Voyage Long and Strange."

The fellowship, which awards up to $6,500 to cover travel, research, and reporting, is open to Journalism School graduates from the last ten years and supports reporting projects that bridge divides and promote equality and understanding. Learn more about the Tony Horwitz Fellowship.