Leadership

Coby McKeown, ’26

English
Peace Studies

Connect with Coby on LinkedIn

Coby McKeown is a senior majoring in English and peace studies. He currently calls Logan, Utah his home, but has previously lived in Hawaii, California, and Singapore.

Coby’s interests focus on peace ecology, religious peacebuilding, transnational networks of solidarity, decolonial theory, and anti-imperialist movements. He is interested in building holistic, pluriversal, and democratic forms of peace and peacebuilding that go beyond the liberal paradigm to restore harmonious relationships between humans, nature, and spirituality.

This past summer, Coby spent several months in India researching environmentalism, rural development, and peacebuilding at Govardhan EcoVillage in Maharashtra. This work allowed him to see the importance of resource sovereignty and regenerative resource cycles in constructing methods of development that eschewed the dominant neoliberal frameworks engendering inequality, fragmentation, and violence. He also spent a semester abroad studying at University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he was able to explore in depth the Northern Ireland conflict, or the Troubles, and particularly its material and rhetorical relations to Palestinian and South African liberation movements.

As part of a creative writing concentration in his English major, Coby is also investigating the transformative potential of literature and poetry in peacebuilding, with a particular sensitivity to how such writing unearths and contends with cultural and structural violence. He is currently writing a thesis that explores American history and the labor disputes in the Midwest that occurred in the early 1930s, emphasizing the power of solidarity and worker movements in creating a more just, peaceful world. Outside of the classroom, he has assembled several zines of poetry and writing from the student community at Notre Dame.

Faiza Filali, ’26

Political Science
Peace Studies, Asian Studies, Korean

Connect with Faiza on LinkedIn

Faiza Filali is a senior majoring in political science with minors in peace studies, Asian studies, Korean studies, and Irish studies. She is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, and Fes, Morocco. 

Faiza interests focus on nuclear security, historical memory, alliance dynamics, and the politics of post-conflict identity formation across East Asia, North Africa, Europe, and the Arab Peninsula. She is particularly interested in intersections of nuclear diplomacy, democratic resilience, and the cultural narratives that emerge around weapons, deterrence, and the trauma they evoke.

She spent a semester studying abroad at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, where she worked on projects exploring U.S.–Republic of Korea–Japan security dynamics. Her ongoing work in Ireland examines “post-two-state disillusion” and the evolution of Irish engagement with global security institutions, and she has also researched diaspora politics, African–Asian relations, and comparative regional security. She is currently writing a senior thesis that analyzes how the nuclear threat is socially and politically remembered across five allied democracies (South Korea, Japan, Australia, Germany, and Ireland) and five nuclear powers (China, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia) and how these memories influence contemporary deterrence and policymaking.

Faiza’s work experience includes time with the National Committee on North Korea (NCNK), serving as a communications and policy intern and supporting research and outreach efforts on U.S. relations with North Korea. She has founded or lead several student organizations, including the Korean Peninsula Working Group, the Middle Eastern and North African Student Association, and the Alexander Hamilton Society, and she currently guides the Students Talk Security podcast for the O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center.