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.
Renata Happle (she/her) is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Political Ecology. Her senior thesis will explore Whanganui river governance in Aotearoa New Zealand which functions as a model of legal plurality, aiming to bridge the dissonant value sets of Maori and settler religions and philosophies. Her research examines the intersection of settler law and religion, colonial and corporate relationality, and governance.
Summer Jones is a junior at Barnard College majoring in Religion. Her research interests include American Christianity, politics, critical prison studies, and the theory of religion. This summer, she will explore how religion is a site at which self-identity is negotiated in American prisons.
Connor Martini is a fourth-year PhD candidate in religion. His dissertation, “The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Presence and Wonder and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” is an ethnographic study of the astronomers and astrobiologists looking for life in the universe. Connor aims to demonstrate how this scientific project, defined by the relationships forged between practitioners and the yet-unseen presences for whom they search, can be more fully understood through the tools and rubrics of religious studies. With the support of the IRCPL Summer Fellowship, Connor will be able to conduct archival research at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and NASA archives, as well as field visits to the Hat Creek and Green Bank Observatories.
Rebecca Sophie Marwege is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, with a focus on Political Theory. Her dissertation investigates the political influence and limitations of new environmental movements. With the help of the IRCPL Summer Fellowship, Rebecca will explore the role of spirituality in environmental movements and the challenge these references pose to an immanent frame of modernity.
Shweta Radhakrishnan is a PhD student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the political economy of ritual possession in Kerala, India and examines the ways in which possession might be understood as a form of labor compelled by the Goddess. The IRCPL Summer Fellowship will fund her archival work in Kerala at the state and regional archives and regional media archives.
Jessie Rubin is a 3rd year PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. Her research explores how contemporary Palestinian and Irish musicians forge an “acoustemological relatedness,” which she defines as shared musical approaches and structures of feeling audible (and visible) in political and musical collaborations. The IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship will fund the first stage of her research in Northern Ireland where she will observe the various ways that support for Palestine/Israel is sounded and crucially mapped onto the religious sectarian divide, with Catholic Republicans supporting Palestinian sovereignty and Protestant Unionists endorsing the Zionist project.
Justin Shaw is a rising Senior majoring in Religion at Columbia College. His research interests include the religious foundations of modernist and "secular" ideologies. This summer, he will be working on expanding on a previous research project entitled "Religious Conceptions of Nature and the Production of Space in the Manhattan Grid Plan" which examines the colonial Christian context of the decision to divide Manhattan's urban space into a grid form.
Nikita Shepard (they/them) is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. Their dissertation tracks the history of public bathrooms in the modern United States, with an emphasis on how diverse social movements and religious constituencies have identified them as both symbols and sites of struggle for justice and full citizenship. The IRCPL Summer Fellowship will fund their archival research on modern conservative religious movements that have blended secular and spiritual arguments campaigns against school desegregation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and transgender rights, focusing on bathrooms to mobilize against civil rights and feminist initiatives by drawing on anxieties over race, gender, and sexuality.
Fern Thompsett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her dissertation research explores the Anti-Civilization Movement, an anarchist environmental movement that coheres around an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist critique of mass agriculture. Fern conducts ethnographic fieldwork in the US Pacific Northwest, where the movement originated, to investigate how those inspired by anti-civilization ethics put these ideas into practice. Specifically, she is interested in how self-identifying settlers seek to contribute to a decolonial agenda, including through attempting to shift from what they identify as a colonial, extractive and anthropocentric worldview toward more Pagan, animist and Earth-based modalities.
Mrinalini Sisodia Wadhwa is a B.A. Candidate in History and Mathematics at Columbia College, with an interest in the relationship between colonial religious law, gender, and mysticism at the turn of the eighteenth century. Her history thesis project centers on French Jesuit missionaries in late eighteenth-century Pondicherry, seeking to reconstruct their role in networks of knowledge transfer linking early modern Europe and India, and to relate their writings on Hinduism to the Jesuit Order’s imperiled status in France, Anglo-French colonial rivalries, and Enlightenment debates on comparative religion. Supported by IRCPL and the Department of History, her summer research draws upon Sanskrit manuscripts, missionary letters, and colonial records at the University of Cambridge Intellectual History of the Late Vedānta Project and in French and Indian archives to trace these missionaries’ ties to Hindu interlocutors, Francophone academicians and philosophers, and colonial society.
Heather Woolley is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the role of images in the Catholic response to secularization and modernization. Concentrating on nineteenth-century France, Heather’s dissertation examines the revival of the Veil of Veronica cult, which reimagined the medieval image-relic as a symbol of the church’s authority and an instrument that would stem the tide of secularization in post-revolutionary France. The project considers how this conservative movement updated a set of iconophile philosophies and practices for a new era of mass media, political upheaval, and globalization.
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.
Sarah Hedgecock is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion in the North American Religions subfield. Her work, which focuses on American evangelicalism from the Cold War to the present, has been supported by the American Examples program at the University of Alabama, as well as research grants from Billy Graham Center Archives at Wheaton College and the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives. Sarah's dissertation investigates nostalgia, relationality, and evangelical girlhood. She holds a BA in anthropology from Princeton University and an MA in religion from Columbia.
Kit Hermanson (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where they study non-binary gender and sexual forms in the nineteenth century United States. Their work follows religious figures like the Public Universal Friend, the Oneida Community, the mythologized "hermaphrodite," and the colonized "berdache" in an exploration of ephemeral gender modes at the end of early America and the stakes of non-binary practices in the face of increasing biopolitical subjugation of the body in America.
Gaurika Mehta is a seventh year doctoral candidate in the religion department. In her dissertation, Bearing the Burden of History: Religion and the Minority Ethics of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi Diaspora, she combines ethnographic and archival research in Guyana, India, and the U.S. to examine the role of religion in the making of the Madrasis—a diasporic community and religious minority formed as a result of colonial forced migration and indentured labor. Her project lies at the intersection of three geographical subfields in Religious Studies—the Caribbean, South Asia, and North America—and highlights the centrality of the study of religion to research on race, migration, minorities, diasporas, and the environment.
Ishai Mishory is a PhD candidate at the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His dissertation, which combines book history, Jewish history, early modern historiography, postcolonial theory and art history, focuses on several ‘secular’ tomes (broadly construed) printed by 15th- and 16th-century Jewish humanist Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino – illustrated books of epic chivalric and Hebrew poetry, love-letter formularies and a Christian Hebraist title of anti-Rabbinic invective – to ask how Gershom’s ‘Jewishness’ to be understood in relation to the Christians and Muslims he worked with in Italy and the Ottoman Empire, when read through his non-religious material. Drawing from diverse archives in English, Hebrew, Latin, Italian, Italian-dialect and German, Mishory’s work deals with early modern conceptions of Jews and Jewishness vis-à-vis nascent early-modern conceptions of race, with the 19th-century discourse of Jewish Bibliography and with the shifting terrain of what exactly constitutes a ‘Jewish book.’
Louis Moffa is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Louis's research focuses on poetry and prose of the Middle Ages as well as the history of philosophy and science. His dissertation looks at representations of the stars in Dante'sDivina Commedia, analyzing how astronomy is used to mediate narratives of creation.