Kaia Stern

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Kaia Stern is the cofounder and director of the Prison Studies Project at Harvard University and a visiting faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she leads the Transformative Justice Program. Her work focuses on ethics, justice, and education in prison.

During her fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute, Stern will explore justice that transforms—our selves, our relationships, and our communities. Through interdisciplinary conversations across Harvard University and beyond, she will engage such disciplines as transformative pedagogy, applied ethics, neuroscience, and public policy to ask fundamental questions about what it means to repair harm in relationships and change systems that cause harm.

Stern is the author of Voices from American Prisons: Faith, Education, and Healing (Routledge, 2014). As a consultant, she has fostered partnerships between activists and law enforcement agencies, faith leaders and community-based organizations, victims’ rights advocates and the US Department of Justice. In 2016, she was invited to the White House to participate in a roundtable discussion on criminal justice reform. Stern received her master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and her PhD from Emory University and is ordained as an interfaith minister.

In Prisons, a Looming Coronavirus Crisis (Harvard Gazette, 4/2/20)