Public Outreach Fellows
The Public Outreach fellowship is a new program started by IRCPL as a part of the “Religion and Climate Change” initiative. Fellows are expected to develop a discrete body of programming or related activities that contribute to and expand upon the intellectual life and public outreach of the Institute. The Public Outreach fellowship awards $10,000 to advanced PhD students and a dedicated budget for the proposed outreach activities.
Dakota Kirkendall Straub is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology department at Columbia University. She is interested in the ways that Western elites make stories about and interact with nonhuman worlds, especially during a time of ecological crisis, through science, communication technologies, and governance. Her dissertation research concerns wealthy individuals who fund and conduct private ocean exploration projects and how they understand their role in the field of marine science. Before beginning graduate studies, she worked for a wildlife conservation organization in Rwanda. She has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Barnard College and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.
Angelica Modabber Sobhandost is a doctoral candidate in the Italian and Comparative Literature departments at Columbia University. Her dissertation explores how the representation of the natural environment is shaped and produced by religious convictions; she focuses on architectural history and the history of science in the 17th century. As a Public Outreach fellow, she hopes to create conversations surrounding the environmental consequences of colonialism in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahara.
SUMMER RESEARCH FELLOWS
The IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship is awarded each Spring to assist graduate and undergraduate students with expenses directly related to research, including travel, lodging, and materials during the Summer semester.
Ana-Luiza de A. Claudio is a 2nd year PhD student in cultural studies in the Latin American and Iberian Cultures Department at Columbia University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Amazonian Audio-Visual Poetics in Extractive Realities: Indigenous Artistic Influence on Contemporary South America,” examines the role of Indigenous artistic expressions in shaping narratives about Amazonian territory and its identities. The research spans the period marked by two waves of left-wing government ascension in South America, from the early 2000s to the 2020s, specifically in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. In particular, she analyzes how Indigenous audio-visual artists and performers from Amazonian territory interpret the idea of spiritual and physical Amazonian landscapes and soundscapes in an extractive time. She aims to investigate how contemporary artists address themes of identity, activism, and environmental relationships through their art and their cosmologies.
Shishir Bail is a 7th year PhD candidate in the Anthropology department at Columbia University. His dissertation research studies the legal lives of Hindu deities in India. This project is a combined textual and ethnographic study of firstly, the legal record dealing with Hindu deities and their status as legal agents, and secondly, the everyday operation of this doctrine in North India. During the summer of 2024, Shishir will analyze the record of legal cases to do with Hindu deities after Indian independence, up until the recent judicial decisions to do with the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya.
Ishaan Barrett is a rising junior at Columbia College majoring in Urban Studies. He is interested in the religionization of public spaces in Washington, DC in a post-pandemic city. His project will analyze how DC mobilizes religion to transform communal spaces into spiritual areas and the way the city operationalizes placemaking in the process.
Julie Xinzhu Chen is a rising junior majoring in Comparative Literature & Society. Her summer project supported by the IRCPL fellowship focuses on the emergence of Chinese modernity that is entangled with religious narratives in Qing Chinese literature. By tracing the “precarious” boundaries between the religious and the literary, she plans to investigate the evolving tension between religiosity and secularism in anticipating Chinese modernity and its transnational context. Her project considers the interconnectedness between textual visuality, the presence and flow of material objects, and the active role religion played in complicating the dynamics of gender and sexuality through heightened attention to materiality in/of texts.
Vered Engelhard is an artist and researcher whose practice unfolds from collaboration and resonance. They write about Andean ancestral technologies, water stewardship, communitarian territorialities, and comparative cosmologies of water. They work the soundscape from performance with expanded field recording techniques and participatory sound designs towards poetic and socioenvironmental justice. Engelhard is a PhD candidate at the Latin American and Iberian Cultures Department. With the IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, they will do archival and fieldwork in Lima and Huarochirí focused on the hualinas, songs for water from the region, in order to complete a chapter that centers the spiritual relationship with water in the Andes.
Rama Ghanem is a first-year MFA candidate in Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts. Her summer research project closes the gaps in an unresolved personal narrative concerning a 1949 excavation that took place on her family's estate in Palestine. The IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship will fund the first stage of a documentary tracing the artifacts' dislocation to seminaries, churches, and other institutions with ties to twentieth-century biblical archeology. On the horizon of her film is a larger conversation around the right to heritage and the dispossession of cultural materials by colonial actors.
Rose Joffe is a rising senior at Barnard College majoring in Religion. Her areas of interest include American Christianity, politics, The Doctrine of Discovery, and American Judaism. This summer, she will explore how the American AIDS crisis shaped conservative Christian rhetoric surrounding morality, homosexuality, and divine retribution.
Constantine Lignos (he/him) is a fifth-year PhD candidate on the East Asian Religions track in the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures. His dissertation studies conceptions of bodies and sacred spaces in Tibetan Buddhist tantric dances called cham to reframe popular understandings of the ritual as merely an exotic spectacle. With the support of the IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, he will travel to Pema Osel Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center in Watsonville, CA, to learn cham dance choreography and continue translating ritual manuals from Tibetan under the guidance of Tibetan Buddhist tantric dance masters.
Mira Mason is a senior at Columbia College majoring in English and Gender Studies. Her senior thesis explores the spirituality present in the concrete poetry of Norman "N.H" Pritchard. Pritchard's poetry is notoriously enigmatic for both past and present readers. Through exploring the spiritual dimension of his writing, this project seeks to gain a deeper meaning of Pritchard's poetry and nuance our conceptions of the Black spiritualism of the ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Esther Park (she/her) is a rising senior at Barnard College, majoring in Political Science and Religion. Her research focuses on the intersection of ecology and religion, focusing specifically on wildfires across the United States, and the religious language utilized to describe these natural disasters. This summer, she will be creating a digital archive that will include interviews with communities impacted by wildfires, social media posts describing the fires, and photos collected on-site of affected areas.
Praboda Perikala is a first-year PhD student in Political Science at Columbia University. She studies the political and religious thought of Indian statesman B.R. Ambedkar, especially how Ambedkar’s Buddhism influenced (or transformed) his early theories of liberalism. This summer, Praboda is researching Ambedkar's formulation of Buddhist history and the comparisons Ambedkar makes between fraternity and maitrī. She is also pursuing language study at the South Asia Summer Language Institute.
David Silverberg (he/him) is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Religion. His research focuses on the intersections between climate change, political economy, and ethno-religious violence in northwestern India. The IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship will fund his archival research in the British Library in London.
Lelia Stadler is a fifth-year PhD candidate at Columbia University's Department of History. Her dissertation project is a social and legal history of Jewish immigrants' encounters with the Argentine state and asks how the legal prohibition on divorce shaped the Jewish family, the Jewish community, and the Jewish citizen in Argentina between c. 1880 and 1960. With the support of the IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, Lelia will conduct research in the Buenos Aires Rabbinate and the Family Civil Section in Buenos Aires.
See here for previous Summer research fellows >
Dissertation FELLOWS
The IRCPL Dissertation Fellowship program grants $5000 awards to advanced PhD students. Fellows are expected to meet monthly with the director of IRCPL to present their research and to workshop chapters of their dissertation.
Alaa El-Shafei is a seventh-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He is currently completing a dissertation on the history of prisons and punishment in modern Egypt.Drawing on multiple archives and using sources in Arabic, English, French, and Ottoman, the dissertation traces the ways colonial rule transformed the penal system, introducing mass incarceration and expanding capital punishment. Civil society actors, including Muftis, Islamists, and anticolonial activists, opposed these institutions, thus placing prisons and punishment at the intersection of politics and culture. By following these struggles, this dissertation outlines the ways that Islam informs punishment in modern states, and the ways that penal practices in turn shape contemporary Islam.
Heath Rojas is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the History Department at Columbia University. His dissertation focuses on “sentimental deism” in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, examining how emotions and sentiment became the basis for a novel religious epistemology that refined crucial elements from the traditional discourse of natural theology. The emotional process of observing the spectacle of nature, authors argued, would inherently inspire belief in God. This idea became widespread among Enlightenment thinkers, including Rousseau, and shaped the radical religious policy of the revolutionaries. Eventually, Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being and its lesser known successor, Theophilanthropy, expanded on this notion by directly linking political morality to one’s affective relationship to divine creation.
Joseph Romano is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His dissertation, Steryngs of the Will: Issues of Volition in Late14th Century English Literature, develops a literary history of the will and contemplative devotion in William Langland, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton, and Julian of Norwich. In these Middle English writers, the will varies widely—as a faculty of desire, action, attention, and prayer. Joseph’s research in medieval spirituality is grounded in his studying spiritual practice with Rohini Ralby, whose teaching and expertise in the practice of contemplation and mystical theology across multiple traditions deeply inform Steryngs of the Will and its account of volition and the contemplative experience of the love of God. Joseph also writes on Dante and his scholastic contemporaries, especially on questions of love, passion, body and soul.
Julián Sánchez González is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Columbia University. His dissertation focuses on exploring the interplay between hegemonic and non-hegemonic spiritual systems in selected installation and performance art practices from Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, and California in the United States during the 1970s-80s. This project contends with the terms "interspirituality" and "spiritual promiscuity" as essential concepts for understanding the arts and art historiography of these decades. By doing so, it seeks to provide a theoretical framework and historical grounding for the resurgence of spiritual themes in contemporary artistic endeavors in the Americas and the Caribbean.
David Silverberg (he/him) is a seventh-year PhD candidate in the Department of Religion. His research, which has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies and Fulbright-Hays, focuses on the intersections between climate change, political economy, and ethno-religious violence in northwestern India.