Florence Graves

Who is Florence Graves?

Florence Graves is an American journalist and the founding director of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

She is an award-winning investigative reporter and editor whose work focuses on exposing abuses of government and corporate power, and on revealing inequities between the powerful and the powerless. She also is a Resident Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. As an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, she and a colleague broke the Senator Bob Packwood sexual misconduct story, which led to an historic three-year Senate investigation followed by a Senate Ethics Committee vote to expel him and then his forced resignation. She has received a number of prestigious fellowship awards, including from the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute, the Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1993 and the Pope Foundation. She founded the award-winning and nationally circulated political and investigative journal, Common Cause Magazine. Her work there led to congressional hearings and to reforms in public policies, and has received such prestigious awards as the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the highest award given in magazine journalism.