Jennifer Petersen

Jennifer Petersen, a first-year Ph.D. student in political science, wrote extensively on issues of memory, identity, and violence in Rwanda during her master’s program in Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. After returning to the United States, she has entered the Political Science department with plans to study the formation of post-conflict identity in Rwanda. In her work, Jennifer has noted the paradox of the government’s attempt to shape a unified Rwandan identity through the elimination of the use of ethnic labels, while gacaca trials on the 1994 genocide and genocide memorials help maintain the salience of ethnicity in society. A recent recipient of a FLAS Fellowship, Jennifer will travel to Kigali this summer with the support of the Scott Kloeck-Jenson Pre-Dissertation Travel Grant to visit genocide memorial sites and gacaca trials, and to speak with members of the NGO community.

Read on about Jennifer’s dissertation research in Rwanda here.