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Current students in the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program:

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Diala Hawi holds a Master's in clinical psychology from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. She has been a university psychology instructor as well as clinical psychometrician. Diala has worked in media ethics research, investigating effects of media coverage and messages on political affiliations and voting decisions. During the wars in Lebanon of 2006 and 2007, she was a volunteer relief provider and a psychosocial coordinator for a local NGO, where she organized workshops on postwar trauma, conflict resolution, dialogue, and group mediation. Diala is currently studying differences in interpretations of conflict and how perceptions of people's group relations could play long-term roles in the prevalence of prejudice and conflict. She would also like to investigate the potential effect of such factors as threat, personality, and ideologies in political affiliations and ultimately, political actions.
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Manisha Gupta obtained a B.S. in Business Administration, and a B.A. in Social Welfare, from the University of California at Berkeley. She has spent the past few years conducting applied psychology work with non-profits in areas related to reducing prejudice and improving intergroup relations. Most recently, she worked as a cultural programming officer for International House in Australia, whose mission is to help increase intercultural understanding. As a team leader for Projects for Peace, Manisha helped develop a grant which is being used to help improve communication and understanding between the university and the local Aboriginal population.
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Jaeshin
Kim received a Master's degree in Cultural Psychology from Korea University in South Korea. He was an intern at the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Seoul, South Korea in 2008. His current research concerns the role that threat and fear play in promoting aggressive conflict. He also studies the influence of US citizens' emotional reaction to the 9/11 attacks on immigration attitudes and policy support.
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Katya
Migacheva studied foreign languages and
cultures at Samara State Pedagogic University (Russia) and studied
psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University (USA). Katya
has worked extensively with organizations promoting democratic values
education in post-Soviet Russia and was one of the creators of
educational programs on cultural tolerance for Jewish teenagers in Samara. She has a keen interest in cross-cultural
communication, humanistic pedagogy, democratic values, Arab-Israeli
conflict, and the lessons of Holocaust. Katya's current research
concerns the facilitation of intergroup contact, trust, and
tolerance in post-conflict societies. She is also a part of a
quantitative evaluation team for the Training Active Bystanders
program, implemented by the Quabbin Mediation Center, which
focuses on promoting social competence and active bystandership among secondary schools in Western Massachusetts.
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Rachel Steele holds a Master’s in peace and justice studies from the University of San Diego. Most recently she worked at the United States Institute of Peace for three years addressing governance and legal issues in Iraq and post-conflict justice and reconciliation in a variety of settings. Prior to attending graduate school, she worked with peace activists in Seattle and volunteered in the Philippines with the Mennonite Central Committee working alongside local peace-builders. To help address gaps in research on the effectiveness of war crimes trials and truth commissions, Rachel is exploring the conditions that can aid in a society’s psychological recovery from armed conflict and wide scale human rights abuses with a particular focus on the roles of reparations and apology. She would also like to investigate the roles of revenge and blame in the breakdown of the reconciliation process, which can lead to renewed conflict.
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Ramila
Usoof-Thowfeek received her Master's from the
University of Massachusetts Amherst in Psychology. She was a research
scholar at the Solomon Asch Center for the study of
Ethnopolitical conflict at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004-2005
and is also a trained mediator. Her current research focuses on how
individuals are able to maintain the perception that they are moral,
despite having committed moral transgressions. She also studies how
different mechanisms are used in moral judgments depending on whether
the transgression is interpersonal in nature or takes place on behalf
of a group in an intergroup context. In addition, Ramila is interested
in creating psychosocial intervention programs, which are culturally
specific, for those affected by intergroup violence. Along this line,
she conducts research in Sri Lanka looking at the influence of
religious beliefs and practice on psychological resilience.
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Amelie
Werther has a Master's degree in Psychology from the
Universität Trier, Germany. Her research aims to understand and
assess elements of respect related to group conflicts. She also
researches the attributional components with which we form evaluative
judgments of other people. Amelie worked in Dr. Ilana Shapiro's
research group on Comparing Conflict Interventions and in 2006 she was
an intern at a non-governmental organization in Buenos Aires,
Argentina: Fundacion Cambio Democratico. This
organization belongs to the network of Partners for Democratic Change
and works to further democratization and participative
conflict resolution (such as mediation) in Latin America.
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Past students:

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Rezarta
Bilali holds a Master's degree in Conflict Resolution from Sabanci University in Turkey. Rezarta is
conducting research in Rwanda and Burundi assessing Tutsis' and Hutus'
attitudes toward each other, willingness to interact, and their
knowledge on origins of mass violence as an academic consultant to the La Benevolencija Rwanda reconciliation radio project.
She has conducted research on youth conflict resolution programs for
Greek and Turkish Cypriots, as well as our attitudes about, and the
relationships between, different types of trust in Albanian and U.S.
student populations. Rezarta’s research focuses on the
relationship between collective memories and construction of social
identities, and recieved a Henry Frank Guggenheim Disertation Award to support her while conducting this research. Rezarta completed her Ph.D. in Spring 2009 and will be taking a position in Fall 2009 at University of Massachusetts Boston, as Assistant Professor, Dispute Resolution Programs, McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies.
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Nick Joyce received his B.A. in Psychology from Lewis and Clark College. He became interested in the psychology of peace while living in East Africa and conducting interviews with Rwandan refugees and other displaced peoples. Nick's interests concern conflict mediation processes and psychological processes surrounding group leadership and conducted research on informational biases in inter-group attitude formation. In Fall 2009 Nick will be continue his studies at the University of Arizona, Communications Department.
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Johanna
Ray Vollhardt holds a Diplom (equivalent to a Master’s) in Psychology from the University of Cologne, Germany. Her research has focused on attributions in intergroup contexts, and prosocial behavior toward outgroup members among victims of interpersonal and intergroup violence (“altruism born of suffering”). Johanna was an intern with La Benevolencija's Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo reconciliation radio programs in 2005-2006. She is one of the academic consultants to the team implementing this project and is working primarily on programs in the DR Congo. In her current work Johanna focuses on victim consciousness, prosocial behavior, and social activism among members of previously victimized groups. In June 2009, Johanna Vollhardt was awarded the Gert Sommer Award for Peace Psychology in Bremen, Germany. Johanna received a Ph.D. in Spring 2009 through our program. She will be taking a position as an Assistant Professor of (Social) Psychology at Clark University in the Fall 2009 and will be an affiliated faculty member of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark.
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Visiting students:

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Sven
Berendes was a German DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) Graduate exchange student from the Philipps Universität at Marburg, Germany. Sven attended UMass Amherst in Fall 2008, studying Social Psychology with a focus on Peace and Conflict studies. As a student assistant of the Social Psychology department in Marburg, he worked with Linda Tropp on intergroup conflict studies. |

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Adekemi
(Kemi) Adesokan was a visiting student in the Psychology of
Peace and Violence Program in Fall 2007. In
collaboration with Dr. Linda Tropp and Dr. Rolf van Dick (University of
Frankfurt), she conducted research focusing on intergroup contact among
ethnic minority and majority status groups in the USA and Germany. Kemi completed her Masters degree in Psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, and is now a doctoral student at Oxford Universty, UK.
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Corinna
Mertz was a visiting student from Fall 2007 to Spring 2008. During her stay she studied reasons for intergroup conflict and violence as well as means, e.g. intergroup contact, to improve intergroup relations. As a member of the RespectResearchGroup, she is currently working on her Master's degree in Psychology at the University of Hamburg in Germany. |
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