Emory graduate students raise the standard for university scholarship. An essential part of Emory’s mission, they strengthen faculty research, contribute to knowledge through their own scholarship, and offer undergraduates an invaluable link to the world of graduate studies.
Kaia Stern vividly recalls the first time she entered a prison. As part of an internship during her senior year in college, she walked into a maximum-security facility and saw sunlight reflecting from the shackles around a man’s ankles. That vision changed her life, inspiring an exploration of punishment and redemption that led her to study at Harvard Divinity School, teach inside Sing Sing prison, and pursue graduate course work at Emory, where she earned a PhD in religion in 2008. Her dissertation, a moving treatise on the transforming power of education, presents the stories of six men who endured decades in Sing Sing, completed a master’s degree program there, and upon their release became leaders in their communities.
Now she is the first director of Pathways Home, a national program of Harvard Law School’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice that helps formerly incarcerated people rebuild their lives. Stern continues her research at the intersections of prison reform, education, and theology. Her hope is that the nation will develop alternatives to incarceration and learn to see the humanity in everyone.
Your investment in Emory Graduate School will help attract the world’s best scholars, students who ask great things of themselves and their university.
