Integrated Immigrant and Refugee Services | New Haven, Connecticut

For nearly a decade, Jessica has served in a wide variety of roles assisting with refugee resettlement. After spending the spring of 2019 at the Joel Nafuma Refugee Center in Rome, Italy, she decided to transform this volunteer work into a new career, which led to her decision to enroll in the MDiv program at HDS last fall.

This summer she is working at IRIS (Integrated Immigrant and Refugee Services) in New Haven, Connecticut assisting with the Afghan Placement and Assistance (APA) program and coordinating the Noncombatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) Afghan family reunification program. Her previous work as a translator at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony catalyzed her interest in how we collect, interpret, translate, disseminate, and appropriate the stories of others. Within a legal context, these questions have crystallized into a concern with the role of personal narratives in adjudicating protected status of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.

Prior to joining HDS, Jessica was a language instructor and scholar of Renaissance literature with a particular interest in women poets, female voices, and gender as a lyric construct. While these two professional paths may seem unrelated, they both reflect her belief in the power of stories, when received by an attentive reader or empathetic listener, to transcend cultural and temporal boundaries.