Staff

Executive Director: Michael Loadenthal

Michael Loadenthal, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of the Peace and Justice Studies Association, and also serves as an Assistant Professor of Research in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati, and the Executive Director of the Prosecution Project. He completed his PhD in 2015 at George Mason University, and previously completed an MLitt at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews in 2010. Dr. Loadenthal has taught courses on political violence, terrorism and sociology at Georgetown University, George Mason University, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Malta, Miami University, Jessup Correctional Institution and the DC Jail. Michael has served as the Dean’s Fellow for the George Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, a Practitioner-In-Residence for Georgetown’s Center for Social Justice, a Research Fellow at Hebrew Union College’s Center for the Study of Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, and a Senior Research Associate with the Better Evidence Project. His work has been published in a variety of venues including Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Perspectives on Terrorism, Journal of Applied Security Research, Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Journal of Radical Criminology, Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies and other social movement and political theory journals and books.

Contact: Michael@peacejusticestudies.org

Student Research Assistant Team

In conjunction with the Executive Director, a team of students are providing research support to help grow and develop PJSA’s many resources. Currently these students are engaged in a variety of projects including building a bi-national departmental directory of peace and justice studies programs, the development of a syllabi repository, supporting PJSA’s annual conference, and the development of outreach and publication materials. In the future, PJSA hopes to constitute additional student research teams at other universities.

Interested faculty members, and those seeking more information on how you can plug in, please contact us.

Emma Lovejoy is the Production Manager for the Peace Chronicle, the PJSA’s quarterly magazine. They started working on the Chronicle in 2019 as an Editorial Intern, and have been on the team ever since. Emma is also a second-year master’s student at UMASS Boston, studying History and Historiography; they earned their B.A from Miami University in 2020, in Social Justice Studies. In their free time, you’ll usually find Emsie making art, or working on one of their writing projects.

Eleyan Sawafta is a Ph.D. student in the Political Science department at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is also a graduate research assistant for the “Migrant Integration in the Mid-21st Century: Bridging Divides” project. Sawafta has completed his Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He also holds an MA in Political Planning and Development from An-Najah National University in Palestine, and a BSc in Engineering from the same university. Sawafta focuses his research on analyzing the relationship between development and conflict through political economy and public policy. He is also interested in studying structural violence and reconciliation. Sawafta has provided commentary on topics such as democracy, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and development through various media and events in the Middle East, Canada, and the US. Since 2022, Eleyan has served as the Social Media Manager for the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Sabrina holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Language Mediation and Intercultural Communication and is a Master’s Graduate in World Politics and International Relations. In 2020, she interned at the Consulate General of Italy in Vancouver, and in January 2021 she started a year-long internship as a Research Assistant at the Budapest Centre for Mass Atrocities Prevention, where she dealt with research projects, writing policy papers and the management of the online library. 

From February 2022 until April 2023, she worked at Think Equal as Business Development Assistant supporting their mission to teach social emotional learning to early years children globally. At the same time, she also spent a year in New York working with an Italian NGO focused on providing assistance with Italian citizenship applications and studying the history of Italian migration in New York.

She is currently the Director of Americas Centre at the Centre for Youth and International Studies. Her prime interests and areas of expertise regard international relations and cooperation, politics, and human rights with a specific focus on the United States and its foreign policy, on which she wrote her final dissertation.