Student Leadership Team
Mojan Farid ‘20 is a junior Geography major and co-leader of Vassar Refugee Solidarity. She also works with the Resettlement and Local Engagement Team. She is a member of Vice music and is studying abroad in the Fall. She was born in Iran and can speak Farsi fluently.
Zoë Zahariadis ‘21 is a sophomore prospective Political Science and French double major. She is the co-leader of Vassar Refugee Solidarity and works on communications, design, and media for the VRS website. She is also a member of Vassar Alliance for Women in Foreign Affairs and Vassar Voices for Planned Parenthood. She hopes to study abroad in France.
Matthew Brill-Carlat ’18 is a senior History major and serves as VRS’s Student Consortium Coordinator. Matthew speaks Spanish, having spent the fall semester of his junior year in Cuba, is learning Arabic, and hopes to declare correlates in Hispanic Studies and Arabic.
Sabrina Surgil ’21 is a sophomore History and French double major. She works alongside Mojan as the leader of the VRS Resettlement and Local Engagement team. In addition, she is a member of Britomartis, Vassar on Tap and the Underground. She hopes to study abroad in France.
William Zemp ‘20 is a junior prospective Independent Major, and Arabic or Hispanic Studies Correlate. He is part of the Oral Histories Team and will be doing work with the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education, which he did research for during the summer of 2017. He works at Matthew’s Bean, the coffee shop located in the library.
Faculty Director
Maria Höhn is the Marion Musser Lloyd ’32 Chair of History and International Studies. She is a German historian and scholar of the American military presence in Germany after WWII, with a special focus on the interaction between African American GIs and German society. Together with Anish Kanoria, she founded Vassar Refugee Solidarity to get the Vassar College community involved in findings ways to help with the unprecedented global movements of people and the resulting crises in states responses.
Alumni
Anish Kanoria ‘18, an international student from India and an Economics and Political Science double major, worked together with Prof. Maria Hoehn to found Vassar Refugee Solidarity. He was the student leader of the initiative.
Patrick DeYoung ’18 was a Political Science major at Vassar, a Vassar Veterans Posse Scholar, and the Chair of Organizations for the Vassar Student Association. Pat was the coordinator for the initiative’s refugee resettlement efforts, which is focused on the Albany Community and School Fundraising Project.
Sophia Slater ’18 was Political Science and French & Francophone Studies double major and spent both semesters of her junior year abroad in Paris, where she studied at Sciences Po. She also wrote articles on refugee issues for Newsweek and was the local coordinator for VRS language tutoring programs. She was also the director of communications, website design and coordination for VRS.
Millie Cunningham ’18 was Political Science major and co-leader of the Oral Histories project. She was also captain of the Women’s Rowing team and worked in the office of Athletic Communications. Millie studied abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark last semester, with coursework focusing on the European migrant “crisis,” international refugee law, and the experiences of migrant children.
Ex-Officio Advisor
Sam Speers is director of the Office of Religious & Spiritual Life and assistant dean for Campus Life and Diversity. He is past president of the Association of College and University Religious Affairs (ACURA). He recently completed an eight-year project as director of Secularity and the Liberal Arts, a Teagle Foundation working group of faculty and chaplains that asked what higher education leaders really mean when we call ourselves “secular.” He is an ordained Presbyterian minister.
He advises Vassar Refugee Solidarity in the Mid-Hudson Refugee Solidarity Alliance.
