Hannah Petersen

Cohort

2025

Subfields

Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Education

Profile

Hannah Petersen is a second-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 people within organizations interpret and respond to organizational change, and her current research seeks to investigate how the dismantling of DEI in higher education impacts organizational members.

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.