Student Profile: Ciara Moezidis, MTS ’23
Ciara Moezidis is a first-year master of theological studies degree candidate with a focus on religion, ethics, and politics. Her more specific focuses are on the Middle East and North Africa and on addressing international human rights violations, such as ethno-religious persecution, apartheid, and genocide. At HDS, she is pursuing a Certificate in Religion and Public Life, and she co-founded the Death Café, a student group for open discourses around death and dying.
Moezidis launched her 280-hour internship requirement earlier this spring semester with an exceptional opportunity to work alongside the UN Special Rapporteur on the Freedom of Religion or Belief. She is also a participant in the experiential course hosted by the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, traveling with her class to Israel/Palestine in June and remaining in the region for an additional internship with The Carter Center in Ramallah, Palestine.
Carrying Middle Eastern Issues into HDS
“Diane Moore is one of the main reasons I came to HDS. I sat in on an interesting class of hers during DivEx, where she was teaching on Israel/Palestine.
Before I committed to HDS, I talked to her again, saying, “Hey, tell me why this is a place for me to be.” She said it’s not for everyone. But it is for certain people who really want to dive deeper into theoretical frameworks with nuances that aren’t being touched upon in policy, so they can bring that to the table. This sounded like something I was up for.
The Certificate in Religion and Public Life is new, so I didn’t know about it until the first week of the fall. It was a bonus for me. I committed to HDS without realizing that the School was building out a robust program for what I am interested in: the intersection of religion and public life in a practical aspect. As a part of that, I’ve been taking classes through the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. Hilary Rantisi, Susie Hayward, Diane Moore, Reem Atassi, and Atalia Omer have all been central to my HDS experience. When I think of HDS, it is these five people, even though I know there’s a whole other world outside of what I’m studying, with other incredible individuals.
Broadening into Other Schools
I applied to concurrent programs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, and I recently received acceptances to both. I am currently deciding on the program that is best for me! My hope with either of these programs is to better understand international NGOs and institutions, and what policymaking looks like in this context.
I am pursuing a policy program to round out the skills and greater understanding of religion that I have gained from my HDS experience. How can we become more religious and culturally literate in both our policymaking and understanding of current issues affecting human rights when advocating for communities who have been wronged? I also would like stronger quantitative skills, so I think the concurrent program would be a great pairing.
I do not fully know what I’m going to do. But I think in the short-term, after graduation, I would love to move to the Middle East and gain greater experience on the ground. I could then see myself doing human rights advocacy at an international NGO, particularly focused on the Middle East and North Africa and on topics of human rights violations, apartheid, and genocide.
Working with the UN
I was working as a graduate assistant for the Religion and Public Life Program in the fall. I primarily supported the assistant director of the CRPL program, Susie Hayward, in finding internship sites for students and building partnerships with other organizations.
During the two months I worked with her, she came across the opportunity to help draft a report on religious or belief minorities in situations of conflict or insecurity, under the external office of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Freedom of Religion or Belief. Susie shared the opportunity with me, saying that it seemed like something I might be interested in, and she was definitely correct.
The CRPL students—there are about 20 of us—would typically do this internship during the summer, but I knew I wanted to be interning abroad in the summer. So, I decided to apply for the fellowship to intern in the winter/spring. I was ecstatic when I received an offer. Since December, I have been working with Special Rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed’s external office to produce this report, which he presented to the UN Human Rights Council in March.
A part of the report, the annex, was on the treatment of Baha’i in Iran, Yemen, Egypt, and Qatar. It was quite cool to see that my undergraduate thesis could inform this report. His staff has a wide variety of experts on different contexts around the world, and it was a great feeling to contribute meaningfully to the annex, based on my past research.
Thus far, this experience has brought to light what I would like to do more of, and less of. I realized I do not get as excited about research. However, this experience has solidified for me that these are topics that I find really fascinating and I want to dive deeper into, but maybe on an advocacy level rather than a fact-finding level.
I wouldn’t have been able to access this opportunity without HDS and wouldn’t have even known it existed. I am so grateful that Religion and Public Life had the tools and the access to be able to think of me and say, “This would be a good opportunity for you.”
Statement excerpted from the full “Humans of HDS” interview conducted and edited by Owen Yager. Photos courtesy Ciara Moezidis. Read the full profile online at humansofhds.tumblr.com.