• Renata Campante
• Kathleen Coyne-McCoy
• Jan Feldman
• Fatemeh Haghighatjoo
• Kessely Hong
• Alicia Silva

Renata Campante

Renata Ramos Campante recently received her LL.M degree from Harvard Law School, where she also spent a year as Visiting Researcher. Her research focused on constitutional law, human rights and anti-discrimination law, with emphasis on the links between disability studies and feminist theories of discrimination. She has also done research on gender-related issues for the Ibrahim Index of African Governance, launched in 2007. During her fellowship at WAPPP, she will work on an assessment of gender mainstreaming as a guiding principle of public policy, in light of the restrictions imposed by the prevalence of an integrationist approach, and the difficulties involved in its measurement. She holds a Bachelor of Laws degree from the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, and has practiced law in a firm specialized in constitutional law in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Kathleen Coyne-McCoy

Kathleen Coyne-McCoy is the Regional Director for Emily’s List, an organization dedicated to electing pro-choice, Democratic women to federal, state and local office. She has designed and implemented training programs for women candidates seeking political office and has helped elect over 100 women to state and local office.  During her fellowship at WAPPP, Coyne-McCoy will develop a training manual designed for the members of the From Harvard Square to the Oval Office program.  Her training will focus on topics such as strategic steps in making the decision to run, getting ready to run, building a campaign plan, creating campaign message, working with the media, and fundraising. Coyne-McCoy holds a M.S.W. from Rhode Island College and a B.A. in Social Work from Providence College.  

Jan Feldman

Jan Feldman is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont.  She has taught courses on topics such as political culture, the problems of political thought, theories of citizenship, and religion and liberal democracy.  During her fellowship at WAPPP, Feldman’s research will explore the dynamics of Israeli and U.S. politics with reference to the growing political activism of women who are inspired by religious, rather than by purely secular goals.  Feldman will use an ethnographic approach, using an open-ended survey instrument, to allow the women she interviews to expand upon their own values, goals and experiences in politics.  The goal of her project is to seek out examples of faith-based religious activism among traditional women with an eye to identifying ways of building coalitions across secular, liberal and religious lines.  Feldman holds a Ph.D. in Political Theory from Cornell University and a B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore College.

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, an Iranian citizen, is a human rights activist and former parliamentarian in the 6th Majils (Iran’s reform parliament) from 2000 to 2004.  During her time in parliament, she was renowned as an articulate and fearless advocate of human rights and women’s rights in particular.  She writes extensively on human rights and has also published on educational and sociological issues.  In 2005-2006, Haghighatjoo was a fellow at MIT’s Center for International Relations.  Previously, she has held professorships at Tehran University and Shahid Behesti University.  While at WAPPP, Haghighatjoo will continue to research and write on human rights, women’s rights and democracy within the Iranian context.   Haghighatjoo holds a Ph.D. in Counseling.

Kessely Hong

Kessely Hong is a doctoral candidate in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government.  Her research focuses on the relationship between gender and other status categories on trust and negotiations.  Hong holds an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government and a B.A. in Government from Harvard College.  She is an Instructor in the Summer Program at the Kennedy School, the recipient of research grants from the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences and the Program on Negotiation, and was formerly a fellow with the Harvard University Native American Program and with the Program on Negotiation.  Previously, Hong was a business analyst with McKinsey & Company. In preparation for her dissertation, Hong will conduct research on why men are more averse to betrayal than women, why women are more optimistic regarding other people’s trustworthiness, and why (and under what conditions) women are assumed to be more trustworthy than men.

Alicia Silva

Alicia, a Colombian citizen, is the former Chief of Staff and Deputy Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia.  Currently, Alicia is the director of the Fund for the Promotion of Culture in Bogotá.  During her fellowship, Silva will examine gender-related dimensions of the study being conducted by the Bogotá government on the city’s recent political, social and cultural transformations.  Some of the questions she will examine include: How and why did female participation in public policy increase so noticeably in Bogotá during the past years? What were the specific contributions of female leadership to the city’s transformations? Are women better suited to handle certain public issues such as the protection of life and the administration of finances?  Silva holds a M.A. in Economics from Stanford University and a B.A. in Psychology from Boston University.