Religion and Public Life Announces 2024-25 RPL Fellows
Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School (HDS) has announced its 2024-25 RPL Fellows, which includes the Fellows in the Professions, the Fellows in Conflict and Peace, and the Fellows in Religion and Public Life.
The RPL Fellows in the Professions are a cohort of expert practitioners who bring deep expertise and social justice commitments to a range of professions—government, education, journalism, organizing, humanitarian action, and arts and popular culture. These fellows join HDS in the fall to support the Certificate in Religion and Public Life available to students in the School’s master of divinity and master of theological studies degree programs. Throughout their fellowships, they will remotely support the Religious Literacy and the Professions course, mentor students, work with the program to identify student internship opportunities, and participate in webinars.
The RPL Fellows in Conflict and Peace are regional practitioners from a wide variety of disciplines who RCPI brings to Harvard to support their peacebuilding work. These fellows engage as intellectual partners with RCPI, work on their own creative projects, present their work in classes and programs across the university, and serve to build bridges between the academy and civic life in the region and in the U.S.
The RPL Fellows are alumnx from different RPL programs who build on the work they began during their time at HDS. These fellows bring religious literacy into their own creative projects and are supported in the work of developing their projects.
A full list of the 2024-25 Religion and Public Life Fellows can be found below:
Angélique Roché: RPL Arts and Popular Culture Fellow
Angélique Roché, Esq. LL.M. is a journalist, producer, author, and professional host from New Orleans, LA. A multi-hyphenate storyteller, her work sits at the crossroads of history, current events, and its impact on pop culture. She has been seen/heard on various outlets and platforms, including Harper’s Bazaar, NBC News, NBCBLK, MSNBC, AMC/BBC, SyfyWire, Disney, Marvel Studios, ESPN, and Paramount+.
Jonah Canner: RPL Education Fellow
Jonah Canner is an ambassador from the world we have not yet built. His focuses include racial equity, restorative justice, experiential education, and working through conflict. He has worked as a classroom teacher, a summer camp director, and a consultant. He is on the faculty of the Avodah institute for Social Change, the Institute for Democratic Education in America, and the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s Cornerstone Fellowship.
Karen Renae Owens: RPL Government Fellow
Karen Renae Owens is a senior policy advisor for the U.S. Government with 25 years of experience across public policy, private, and nonprofit sectors. Owens has worked with multinational Fortune 100 companies, at the William J. Clinton Foundation, and for President Clinton’s Health Access Initiative (CHAI) in Africa. Karen also founded her own consulting firm and worked as an entrepreneur in the Middle East.
Mike Delaney: RPL Humanitarian Action Fellow
Michael Delaney has worked in international development and humanitarian response for his entire career. During his 25 years with Oxfam America, he led humanitarian emergency responses for some of the largest scale disasters of this century. Delaney champions the primacy of local community involvement on both long-term development projects and emergency response programs, advocating that the voices of those affected by disasters are included in the design, implementation, and evaluation of emergency response. Delaney was also Executive Director of Perkins International and founded Crescendo International in response to the increasing demand for humanitarian action from the intensified climate crisis and global conflicts.
Deborah Jian Lee: RPL Journalism Fellow
Jian Lee is an award-winning journalist, radio producer, and a senior editor at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. She worked for the Associated Press, taught journalism at Columbia University, and has bylines in Esquire, Fast Company, ELLE, Foreign Policy, Slate, Playboy, Religion Dispatches, TIME, WBEZ, WNYC and others. She is also the winner of a Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award and the Education Writers Association's Eddie Prize.
Joshua Wolfsun: RPL Organizing Fellow
Joshua Wolfsun is a political strategist and communications professional with a twelve-year track record of building power and winning tough fights for progressive change. He previously served as the Campaign Manager for Sonia Chang-Díaz’s 2022 Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign and as Vice President at the labor communications firm 617MediaGroup. He also played leading roles in campaigns that successfully passed a landmark $1.5 billion education equity bill, won nation-leading police reform legislation, and sought to abolish anti-Palestinian policies within Jewish organizations.
Salma Waheedi: RPL Fellow in Conflict and Peace
Salma Waheedi is a Lecturer on Law and Executive Director of the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World (PLSMW) at Harvard Law School. Waheedi is also an affiliated faculty of the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School and an affiliate of the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative at the Harvard Divinity School. Waheedi’s research and legal practice focus on gender, social and economic justice, comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, and human rights, with extensive expertise in the Middle East and North Africa.
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian: RPL Fellow in Conflict and Peace
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian feminist, is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Faculty of Law, Institute of Criminology, and Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare. She is also the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London. Her scholarship focuses on knowledge production in relation to accumulative trauma, state criminality, surveillance, gender violence, and law and society.
Orwa Switat: RPL Fellow in Conflict and Peace
Orwa Switat is an urban planning scholar, practitioner, and activist with degrees in philosophy, political science, and urban and regional planning, focusing on state-minority relations in planning and the status of groups in cities. Since September 2023, Switat has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. Switat advised municipal bodies in Israel on integrating Palestinian communities within urban planning projects. Additionally, Switat consulted for organizations promoting spatial justice among minority groups against displacement. From 2019 to 2023, Switat was a member of Haifa's municipal committee for historical building preservation.
Ariella Gayotto Hohl: RPL Fellow
Ariella Gayotto Hohl is a writer, producer, filmmaker, and scholar from São Paulo, Brazil. Raised in a multi-religious environment—born Christian, raised Jewish, and converting to Islam as an adult—Ariella has a unique perspective on faith and identity. Ariella’s research and creative projects shed light on the diverse ways in which Muslims live their faith. Her work focuses on documenting the nuanced lives of overlooked Muslims. As the host and co-writer of the upcoming film Islam’s Greatest Stories of Love (premiering on PBS in 2025), she delves into deeply personal and often untold narratives within the Muslim community.
Alice Hoffman: RPL Fellow
Alice Hoffman's first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one while she was studying at Stanford and was published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She has since published over thirty novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and adults. Hoffman received the 2020 Dayton Peace Prize for fiction, the Jewish Book Clube Award, and the Julia Ward Howe Prize for her novel about the Holocaust, The World That We Knew. Her teen novel, Incantation, a story about Jewish life during the Spanish Inquisition was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the best books of the year, and Toni Morrison called The Dovekeepers, her novel about Masada, “.. a major contribution to twenty-first century literature.” Hoffman is also the author of the Practical Magic series.
Religion and Public Life is an initiative that includes degree and certificate programs to advance the public understanding of religion in service of a just world at peace.