Hannah Petersen

Hannah Petersen is a first-year PhD student in Sociology, a graduate affiliate with the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity (CREO), and a Burns Fellow in the Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER). As a sociology graduate student, she is interested in understanding how the organizational structures of schools and universities perpetuate racial and ethnic inequality, and she wishes to study the efforts schools and universities make to address racial and ethnic inequity on the organizational level.

Hannah graduated summa cum laude from Hamilton College in 2022 with a B.A. in Sociology and minors in Music and Theatre. After graduation, she completed a year-long Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Dobrich, Bulgaria, where she provided English language instruction to 5th through 12th grade students at the St. Kliment Ohridski School of Arts. Prior to enrolling at Notre Dame, she worked as a sociology research specialist at the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, a small think tank dedicated to researching the modern landscape of spiritual care in the United States. At CIL, she managed a project on “spiritual innovation,” or faith-based social entrepreneurship, working alongside Wendy Cadge (Bryn Mawr College) and Amy Lawton (Bryn Mawr College) to conduct both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis.