Orelia Jonathan

Orelia Jonathan is a sixth-year doctoral student concentrating in Culture, Institutions, and Society at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research interests focus on whether education contributes to or alleviates conflict in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on history education. 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 currently conducting a comparative case study across schools in South Sudan.

At Harvard, she has taught a wide range of courses, from Education in Armed Conflict to Introduction to Qualitative Methods and the History of Higher Education. In addition, she served on the Editorial Board for the Harvard Educational Review for two years as the Content and Manuscripts Editor. She currently works as a research assistant for the Harvard Legacy of Slavery initiative for the subcommittee on curriculum writing normative case studies for the project. She is also a current Graduate Student Associate and affiliate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

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.

Research Interests: History and Citizenship Education, Education in Conflict, History of Higher Education, Teachers, Teacher Identity, Qualitative Methods