Orelia Jonathan is a sixth-year doctoral candidate concentrating on Culture, Institutions, and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is also currently a National Academy of Education Spencer Dissertation Fellow. Her research interests focus on whether education contributes to or alleviates conflict in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on history education and teachers in South Sudan. Her dissertation project explores how teachers navigate teaching history in conflict settings with a specific focus on teacher’s lived experiences and how they draw on their personal experiences of the conflict to enact the history curriculum in their classrooms. In this work, she examines whether the new South Sudanese history curriculum and the teaching of this curriculum contributes to peacebuilding in South Sudan. To do this work, she is conducting a comparative case study across schools in South Sudan. For her research on teachers and history education in South Sudan, she has funding from the International Peace Research Association Foundation, the Harvard Center for African Studies, the Harvard Graduate School of Education Programs Office and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
She has co-designed and taught four different courses: The Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Universities, with Dr. Julie Ruben at Harvard College; Designing Intercultural Learning Experiences, with Dr. Liz Duraisingh, Equity and Opportunity: Class in Context, with Dr. Irene Liefshitz, and Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery: A Normative Case Study Initiative with Dr. Meira Levinson at the Harvard Graduate school of Education. In addition to co-designing these courses, she has served on 11 additional teaching teams. In these roles, she has led class, assessed papers and final projects, and provided valuable mentorship to college and graduate students, often mentoring students through qualitative research studies and proposals.
At Harvard, she is currently a Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, serving as the Student Representative on the Weatherhead Center Executive Committee. She is also a member of the Research on Identity Politics Cluster at the center. In addition to her work with Weatherhead, she has served on the Harvard Educational Review and worked with the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Initiative.
Prior to her doctoral work, Orelia taught history at The Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. She has also spent summers teaching English to and working with Chinese students in Shenzhen, China who plan on attending independent schools in the United States; she continues to teach students virtually in her free time. She holds a MS in Education from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in History and African-American Studies from Wesleyan University. Beyond school, she is an identical twin, enjoys running, teaching yoga and creating community around fitness.