After 35 years, Reverend Janet Cooper Nelson, the University’s chaplain, will retire at the end of this academic year.
Throughout her time as chaplain, Cooper Nelson sought to support students, faculty and staff through leading community-based religious and spiritual initiatives, engaging in personal conversations and fostering a welcoming environment.
“Reverend Cooper Nelson embodies the soul of the University,” Daniel Solomon ’26 said. “I know that she will be greatly missed, but the impression that she’s left on our community is set in stone.”
On her arrival at Brown in 1990, Cooper Nelson was the first female chaplain in the Ivy League. She previously held several leadership positions at Dartmouth, Mount Holyoke College and Vassar College, she said in an interview with The Herald.
In her first few years on College Hill, Cooper Nelson solicited student feedback to determine how she could best serve the campus community, she said. In a time of “dot matrix printers and hand-printed data,” Cooper Nelson led a survey of over 1,500 students, asking them what they expected from a University chaplain.
Through the surveys, she found that the Brown community’s religious diversity wasn’t represented in the Office of the Chaplains and Religious Life at the time.
She then recommended the University hire additional associate chaplains to better represent the diverse array of religious practices within the campus community, and ensured that each student religious group had an appropriate faculty advisor.
Cooper Nelson noted that her duties extended to issues beyond religion, given that she was “responsible for the care of the University community.”
“There’s been a move to think of chaplaincy work as very narrowly religious,” she said. “It actually never has been.”
After trying out careers in medicine, law and finally, education, Cooper Nelson saw her role as chaplain as a means to “spill over in every direction” and immerse herself in different aspects of the campus community, on and off College Hill. Over the course of her tenure, she has traveled to other universities, such as Harvard, Emory University and Stanford University, to support their own chaplains.
“My job at Brown is almost without boundaries, and I love that,” she added. “I will never say anything other than I was so incredibly lucky to have done my work.”
Throughout the three and a half decades Cooper Nelson has spent in Providence, she often hosted students at her home for interfaith Thursday Night Suppers, where she gave attendees the opportunity to gather together and hear from a range of speakers of various religious backgrounds.
“Thursday supper was a way to extend, quite literally, hospitality,” she said. “You got a meal. You got a conversation.”
On Mondays, Cooper Nelson can be found on the fourth floor of Page-Robinson Hall leading Brown’s Bereavement Group, which helps support students who are experiencing grief, Anna Ryu ’25 explained.
“She really helped me feel a sense of belonging and safety in that particular space,” Ryu said. “She is so incredibly consistent in the way that she is present.”
Cooper Nelson also helped spearhead the Religious Literacy Project, which is a student-run, non-credit course offered to students, staff and faculty of any religion. She explained that the course offers a more accessible way for students to gain a broad overview of world religions.
While Cooper Nelson has received a myriad of awards for her work in chaplaincy, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Chaplains and Spiritual Life in Higher Education, students and faculty shared that her true impact can be measured by how she has engaged with the community around her.
William Loughridge ’26 was introduced to Cooper Nelson through TNS his first year at Brown and was “instantly captured by her whole vibe,” he said.
“If there’s anything happening that you need help with, she can always figure it out,” he added. “She’s always been someone you can go to with anything.”
Inspired by his experiences with Cooper Nelson, Loughridge now works in the OCRL as an Interfaith Student Coordinator. “There's not a lot of things that I do at Brown that haven’t in some way been influenced by Reverend Janet,” he said.
Gary Wessel, a professor of biology and a longtime friend of Cooper Nelson, shared that he often sees Cooper Nelson making her way to her office. Each time he sees her, she’s chatting with a different student, faculty or staff member, he said.
“It must have taken her hours to walk the four blocks from her house to her office,” he said. “But in those four hours, she probably had the most amazing conversations.”
Other students connect with Cooper Nelson through her office hours. “It’s almost impossible to walk away from office hours with Reverend Cooper Nelson not feeling renewed in your purpose and in your conviction,” Solomon said.
Throughout her time at the University, Cooper Nelson also served as an academic advisor to students and helped them “figure out how to get their heart and their head to go together,” a job she said she absolutely loved.
“She connects her very bright and deep administrative knowledge with that genuine, individual care that she has for everyone,” Ryu explained. “That makes her one of the best advisors.”
In addition to her time spent on College Hill, Cooper Nelson is a clinical faculty member at the Warren Alpert Medical School and a board member of the Home and Hospice Care of Rhode Island Ethics Committee.
At Warren Alpert, she teaches a course focusing on the personal and practical aspects of practicing medicine, as she aims to help students channel “their love of clinical care and their hope to better people’s lives.”
When she isn’t chatting with students across campus or downtown at Warren Alpert, you can often find Cooper Nelson writing various invocations, poems and prayers for University ceremonies.
She explained that she aims for each piece to have a personal meaning for every listener and that she regards her written works as some of her most prideful accomplishments.
“I really feel like our words matter,” she said. “I want to evoke whatever is holy for you.”
Cooper Nelson will continue writing and preaching in her retirement and has a plethora of other plans to keep her busy — continuing to strengthen the Tougaloo College exchange program, teaching at Warren Alpert and preparing her new home in Tiverton to host student retreats.
“I’m not very good at sitting around eating bonbons,” she said. “I like bonbons, but I’m eager to stay engaged.”
While Cooper Nelson might be leaving College Hill behind, she still wants to support the campus community.
“I know this time feels very uneasy and dangerous,” she said. “It’s essential that we take care of each other and that we keep our eyes on the care of others.”
