Harvard Divinity Alum Samirah Jaigirdar Explores Religion and Politics

Samirah Jaigirdar, MTS ’24, joined the HDS community as an international student from Dhaka, Bangladesh. With a background in international relations and global Islamic studies, she came to Harvard with the goal of studying political science through the lens of religion. Jaigirdar is continuing her exploration of politics and religion in a PhD program at Georgetown University.

Samirah Jaigirdar’s experience pursuing her bachelor’s degree at Connecticut College proved to be foundational to her future work at HDS. While completing her senior project as an undergraduate, she recognized a gap between theory and practice. This gap sparked her interest in translating her research to practical applications within the world of politics and set her on her academic path.

At Harvard, Jaigirdar bolstered her time in the classroom with experiential learning opportunities. Her focus on religion and public life led to a prestigious internship with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) to research violent extremist group rehabilitation. While going through statistical data and interviews, she identified the throughline of religion in the data. Despite religion routinely appearing in the data, it was not incorporated into rehabilitation practices. She began researching how religious literacy can be applied to terrorist disengagement programs. Jaigirdar turned the work she did with USIP into her capstone project, “Contending with Religion: The Case to Incorporate Religious Literacy in Disengagement Programs.”

While balancing internships, academics, and research, Jaigirdar also held leadership positions at HDS. She was the student academic chair for the theological studies curriculum committee, where she helped revise and refine the language for each area of focus within the MTS degree program. She approached the curriculum the same way she approached her research. In her words, she focused on “how the School could adapt the curriculum to engage more people and improve understanding of religious literacy.”

In addition to impactful learning experiences on and off campus, Jaigirdar found community and mentorship at Harvard Divinity School. “Learning from Professors Swayam Bagaria and Teren Sevea—people who come from backgrounds similar to mine—helped me see that I could also find a place within academia,” she says. Jaigirdar also noted the guidance she gratefully received from Diana Eck while working on the Pluralism Project together. In preparation for Professor Eck’s retirement, Jaigirdar spent Fridays helping her beloved teacher archive an array of content accumulated over decades of teaching at Harvard. This work proved to be life-changing for Jaigirdar: “Sitting on the floor in my professor’s office, surrounded by books and manuscripts and decades of research, I realized this is a career path—and that this is the career I wanted.”

Jaigirdar is now pursuing a PhD in international relations at Georgetown University, where she studies how insurgency groups in South Asia use religion to attract followers. With a focus on politics grounded in religious literacy, she hopes her academic work will promote safety and security around the world.

For more information about Samirah Jaigirdar’s studies, visit hds.harvard.edu/2024DeansReport/Jaigirdar.
 

—By Dionne Wareham, EDM ’24, Communications Specialist