Jennifer S. Bryson
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Photo by Carmen Mayrhofer
Jennifer S. Bryson is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the Catholic Women's Forum.
She is currently translating works by the Catholic author Ida Friederike Görres from German to English. Her first book-length translation, The Church in the Flesh, was released in October 2023. Her second, John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed, in September 2024 She is also studying the work of Augustin Rösler, CSsR, a leader of 19th and early 20th century Catholic resistance to feminism.
Jennifer lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Jennifer has a BA from Stanford University in Political Science, an MA from Yale University in History, and a PhD from Yale in Greco-Arabic and Islamic Studies from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. As an undergraduate at Stanford, she studied Marxism-Leninism for two semesters at the Karl Marx University in the former East Germany.
She writes on the Catholic Church, questions of man and woman in society, foreign affairs, and how to keep politics out of sports for journals such as Crisis Magazine, One Peter Five, The Lamp, and Public Discourse. She is a Contributor to Creation Theology Fellowship, where readers can find her Marvel, Believe, Care Creation Coloring Book and her puppet show, The Days of Creation.
She was a 2019 Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow. In 2019 She was a Visiting Fellow at the Hudson Institute. From 2009 - 2018 she studied and worked with Muslims who support religious freedom. From 2009 - 2014 she was Director of the Islam and Civil Society Project at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ, and from 2014-2016 she was founding Director at the Zephyr Institute in Palo Alto, CA.
She taught part-time 2010-2017 and was a Visiting Professor 2012-2013 at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA. From late 2001-2008 she worked for the U.S. Department of Defense. Her assignments included strategic outreach to media and civil society institutions in Egypt and Yemen, working at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and serving on the Policy staff of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. While working for DIA, she was an interrogator at Guantanamo from 2004 - 2006. She has written about her experience at Guantanamo at The Public Discourse and The Lamp. In 2023, The Irish Catholic published a feature article about her work on this topic. She is a member of the Group of Friends Experts for the Convention against Torture Initiative 2024 (cti2024).
From 2021 to 2023 she was a Visiting Researcher at the European Institute for Philosophy and Theology at Hochschule Heiligenkreuz in Austria.
Jennifer is the Founder of Let All Play, a project advocating to get politics out of sports. She encourages you to sign and share her international petition to FIFA against political symbols on soccer uniforms and field equipment.
A list of Jennifer's translations and academic publications is at Academia.edu.
She is an adult convert to Catholicism. You can watch her story, "Conversion from Studying Marxism in East Germany into the Catholic Church," here from 00:31:17 - 00:55:27.
Outside the office, Jennifer enjoys gardening, walking her dogs Poppy and Kirby, and riding her bicycle for day-to-day transportation.
