Tanya Cooper Receives Pepperdine Research Grants and Oxford Fellowship

Clinical Law Professor Tanya Asim Cooper has received multiple grants from the Pepperdine Provost's Office towards her research project on Church responses to intimate partner violence. Together with her colleagues, Roslyn M. Satchel (Seaver College) and Thema Bryant-Davis (Graduate School of Education & Psychology), Professor Cooper was awarded $50,000 from the Pepperdine Cross-School Collaborative Research program and $10,500 from the Community-Based Research Program. These grants continue the collaborative research of these professors, whose disciplines in law, theology, and psychology have examined this global epidemic affecting one in three women worldwide. In 2015-16, they received $49,000 from the Provost's Office grant initiatives. Last October they convened an academic conference at Pepperdine University titled, "In Search of Sanctuary: Strengthening the Church's Response to Intimate Partner Violence." A unique aspect of the project is to center marginalized victims' voices in the research.

"In this #MeToo era, churches are speaking up about intimate partner violence in their faith communities, and we are seeing #ChurchToo and #SilenceIsNotSpiritual movements rising," Cooper said. "My research partners and I are grateful for Pepperdine's support of this important work," she added.

Pepperdine University also awarded Professor Cooper with a visiting fellowship to the Summer Research Institute at Harris Manchester College in the University of Oxford. "This is a great honor, and I am excited for the opportunity to share my research with and learn from the academic community at the University of Oxford," Cooper said.