Amanda J.G. Napior, MDiv, PhD

Amanda co-creates and facilitates inclusive, collaborative, often transgressive spaces through reflexivity, ritual, play, and trauma-informed practices. As someone with mostly dominant identities and who has been impacted by trauma, Amanda partners with people working through trauma healing, social identity development, active allyship, and collective responsibility for harm and joy in our great big human family. A work in progress like us all, Amanda is obsessed with belonging, healing, and collective liberation.

As an instructor in ministry studies at Harvard Divinity School, Amanda supports the next generation of religious and ethical leaders. She has published in peer-reviewed journals and for general audiences, including in two collaborative book projects on trauma-informed yoga. She is working on a book entitled From the Inside: Personal Transformation and Spirituality in American Corrections, a critical religious ethnography about the lived and historical connections between incarceration and preoccupations with personal transformation in the United States. Standing in solidarity with people living in carceral systems, Amanda is also committed to people working in them: liberation is an infinity-sum game.

Amanda received a PhD in Religious Studies and a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Boston University, an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, and a B.A. in religion from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is currently pursuing a Conflict Mediation Certificate through the Community Dispute Settlement Center.