Summer 2023
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.
summer 2022
Jealool Amari is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. His research is inspired by notions of epistemic rupture and ethical reorientation brought about by colonialism in Islamic Africa. His dissertation is a conceptual history of the East African coast in an era of colonial language standardization, and draws from Islamicate and Pan-African discourse bridging Swahili, Arabic, and English.
Zheng Fu is a PhD student in the Sociology department at Columbia University. Her dissertation will investigate the role that narratives play in conspiracy movements, with a special focus on the concept of body pollution in mobilizing participation in conspiracy movements. She will analyze how the narrative patterns of folklores evolved longitudinally and how conspiracy narratives affect the survival of conspiracy communities through automated text-analysis.
Kit Hermanson (they/them) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Their dissertation explores dynamics of gender, race, religion, and anti-capitalism in 19th century intentional communities by arguing that the hundreds of separatist communities founded across the United States are best understood as a political and cultural movement. The IRCPL Summer Fellowship will fund their archival research of the Oneida Community, transcendentalist communes, early Latter-day Saints, radical newspapers, the Society of Public Universal Friends, the Shakers, anarchist free-lovers, and more.
Emily Hoffman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. Her research focuses on the state child protection apparatus in the United States. She is broadly interested in social reproduction, racial capitalism, Indigenous sovereignty, psychoanalysis, legal anthropology, state bureaucracy, kinship, and political, therapeutic, and religious theories of repair. Her dissertation fieldwork takes place in Eastern Oklahoma. The project examines both the day-to-day operations of the child welfare bureaucracy and the larger cultural itinerary of child abuse and neglect as a concept, as well as the political imaginaries it authorizes and forecloses.
Chazelle Rhoden is a doctoral student in the Anthropology department. Her research investigates how Black communities navigate environmental conservation engendered by climate change. Her dissertation project brings analyses from afro-religious praxis, where relations with forests and Orixas are integral, to illuminate how social scientists may attend to the biophysical world and anti-Blackness in the face of planetary crisis. She conducts research in Salvador, Brazil, where practitioners of Candomblé have sustained eco-systems through their relationalities and intimacies with the Atlantic Forest.
Sara Jane Samuel is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences. Her research on the intersection of American foreign policy, national security, and public health spans multiple disciplines. Sara's dissertation explores the ways in which mass vaccination campaigns were deployed as a diplomatic instrument by the United States between 1960 and 1990. With the IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship, Sara is grateful to be able to explore how local religious authorities in Mexico and Pakistan have historically mediated vaccine uptake. The main goal of Sara's research is to identify and highlight non-violent and non-militarized ways to protect American security interests and pursue global health equity.
Rishav Kumar Thakur is a third year PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at Columbia University. Rishav studies articulations of, and claims around, identity and belonging in Assam, India. In doing so, his work aims to understand patterns of violence, dissent and queer imaginations of community in the region.
Lily Conable is a senior at Barnard College majoring in Religion. Her research interests include American Christianity, politics, early Christianity, Bible, and the theory of religion. This summer, she will research the Re-Imagining Community, a radically alternative Christian movement from the late 20th century, at Union Theological Seminary and the Minnesota Historical Society. She hopes her research will expand upon and trouble the existing scholarly narrative of American Christianity.
Alethea Harnish is an undergraduate multi-disciplined artist and playwright in her final year in the religion department at Columbia University. Her senior thesis will explore contemporary forms of New Age Spirituality and how they are informed by recent developments in Quantum Theory, both of which took hold of American society alongside the hippie movement of 1960’s and 1970’s drug and anti-war culture. It will also demonstrate how all of these threads are intimately entangled with the emergence of contemporary cyberculture in a full-length theatrical performance, tentatively titled this is your computer on drugs, to be presented on Columbia University’s campus in Spring 2023. The play will be produced alongside the course she is assisting her thesis advisor, Mark C. Taylor, with titled Hippie Physics, Counterculture, Cyberculture.
summer 2021
Callum Blackmore is a PhD candidate in historical musicology at Columbia University studying French opera in the long eighteenth century. His dissertation, provisionally titled “Opera at the Dawn of Capitalism: Staging Fiscal Crisis in France and Its Colonies from Rameau to Cherubini,” explores representations of economic life on the operatic stage in the lead-up to the French and Haitian Revolutions. The IRCPL fellowship will support archival research on representations of clerical figures in French Revolutionary comic opera.
Alejandro Cuadrado is a PhD candidate in the Department of Italian and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. In his research, he explores the intersection of religious life and social institutions in late medieval Italian literature, with a focus on the depiction of religious orders in Dante's work. More specifically, his dissertation seeks to understand how Dante tells the history of medieval religious institutions and orders in the Commedia, bringing together poetry, religion, politics, and history.
Lynton Lees is a PhD candidate in the History department. Her research examines the politics of education in the late British empire. In her dissertation, she explores how educators developed new forms of education to teach democratic citizenship to children in the British empire amid the rise of totalitarian education in interwar Europe. Tracing the dissemination of these ideas across the British world during postwar reconstruction, her research reveals the exclusion of imperial subjects in Britain’s non-white colonies from these blueprints for self-governance on the eve of decolonization. Drawing on extensive archival research in the UK, her work seeks to recover the influence of prominent Christian thinkers in the intellectual project of democratic defense through children's education, and the evolution of colonial missionary activity within broader transformations in imperial pedagogical thought and practice.
Sophia Mo is a PhD candidate in French and Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Her dissertation is a transnational feminist intellectual history of the Algerian revolution (1954-1962) and the first post-independence regime (1962-1965). Examining the understudied work of female journalists in the Francophone and Arabophone press, it shows how women made intellectual contributions as reporters, mediators, and translators to the project of connecting Algeria to other national liberation movements.
Howard Rechavia-Taylor is a doctoral candidate in the department of Anthropology. He is broadly interested in the political, legal, and psychological grammars by and through which historical afterlives are articulated, made legible, and reckoned with in and for the present. In his dissertation research, he focuses on the aftermath of German colonialism and the manner in which the German government is dealing with transnational legal and political claims to repair the legacy of genocide in Namibia. What happens when colonial histories become diverse demands for reparation in western courtrooms, negotiating tables, and parliaments? How does the legacy of the Shoah and the figure of the Jew come to form the manner in which demands for repair are articulated and responded to in Europe's powerhouse? How do the history and contemporary practices of white nationalism and white supremacy in both Namibia and Germany intersect with these struggles?
Julián Sánchez González is a researcher and essayist currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at Columbia University. His research focuses on the relationship between artistic and spiritual practices in the modern and contemporary eras, particularly in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States. Previously, Sánchez González pursued an MA in Art History at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts and a double BA in History and Political Science at the Universidad de los Andes, and served as Coordinator of the Education Department at the Museos del Banco de la República in Bogotá. His work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia, and the Fundación Colfuturo, as well as by the Heyman Center for the Public Humanities and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia. His writing has been published by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), Oxford Art Online, the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, the Universidad Tres de Febrero, and Artsy, among others.
Doha Tazi Hemida is a PhD student in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Her research interests include Islamic and comparative political philosophy and theology. She works with Arabic, Persian, French and English texts.
Fatima-Ezzahrae Touilila is a PhD candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She holds degrees in Law and Political Science from Sciences Po (Paris) and Columbia University. Her research brings together history, political philosophy and anthropology. Her current project focuses on the French colonization of North Africa and its conception and management of Islamic institutions.
summer 2020
Chloé Faux is a 4th year doctoral candidate. Her dissertation examines the historical and emergent dilemmas of reproduction in contemporary South Africa. Her work centers the ancestral realm as a site of speculation to examine modes of black relationally but also rupture, through the logic and exercise of violence. She put multiple theories of the political, including queer, feminist, Marxist, Afropessimist, Pan-African, and postcolonial thought, into conversation with each other, while grounding her work in ethnographic practice.
Margaux Fitoussi is a PhD student in Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. Her research analyzes transformations in social life and the built environment in the Maghreb in the wake of colonialism, migration, and political authoritarianism. More specifically, she focuses on projects of demolition and preservation in Tunisian cities while engaging philosophical and political theoretical debates about materiality, cosmopolitanism, and cultural memory.
Sayori Ghoshal is a PhD candidate in Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. Her research interests include intellectual history, political thought, and the public life of concepts in modern South Asia. In her dissertation, she traces the epistemological production of ‘minority’ as a group identity, in late colonial and early postcolonial India. Based on archival materials, she examines how religious difference intertwined with biological categories and with the politics of enumeration to constitute non-Hindus as the ‘minority’ vis-a-vis a secular national ‘population’.
Aaron Glasserman is a PhD candidate in Columbia University’s Department of History. He is currently writing a dissertation, Islam and Muslim Politics in Modern China. Focusing on the central province of Henan, it situates the formation of a national Chinese Muslim political constituency and the division of Chinese Muslims into rival sects in the party politics, mass media, bureaucratization, and war that followed the collapse of the Qing dynasty. It traces changes in the interpretation of Islam as well as changes in how Chinese Muslims have related to one another and to the broader social and political context of post-imperial China. Its larger historiographical claim is that these developments were interrelated and must be integrated into a coherent narrative. It draws on more than a year of documentary and ethnographic research in archives and mosques throughout Henan, in other parts of mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan.
Ishai Mishory is a PhD student at the Department of Religion at Columbia University, where his research in Jewish history focuses on the culture of Hebrew printing in Renaissance Italy and the Ottoman Empire. He has written and published about the special place early modern Hebrew printed material occupies in Jewish material history and its cultural historiography, and has engaged with the reception of print technology in different cultures in light of the postsecular turn in religious studies. The IRCPL fellowship will support research into early modern printed tomes held in libraries and archives in the Middle East, Italy and the United States in the fall of 2020.
Sonja Wermager is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music, where she studies intersections of music, religion, historicism, and nationalism in the late works of German Romantic composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856). Her work seeks to problematize narratives of creative failure that have characterized reception of Schumann's late compositions, asking instead what we might learn about these works by examining them within the complex landscape of mid-nineteenth-century belief and spirituality. The IRCPL fellowship will support archival work at research centers in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Zwickau.
Lexie Ruth Mitchell is a BA candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia. She currently works as an intern at the Religions for Peace International Secretariat at the United Nations Church Center. Her research interests include South Asian Tantra, Hindu Goddess traditions, New Religious Movements and New Age religiosity. Her current research focuses on menstruation practices in contemporary Tantric communities and centers around questions of authority, the role of the female in Tantric practice, women’s health and spiritual multiculturalism.
Summer 2019
Nile Davies is a PhD candidate in Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology. His dissertation examines the historical conjunctions of labor, settlement and the built environment in the Western Area of Sierra Leone, where centuries of successive arrivals have produced powerful ideological associations between place, space and categories of personhood (“creoles”, “natives”, “strangers”). Charting the vexed status of the city through its material and economic disparities, his ethnographic work considers the politics and affects of building and dwelling in post-conflict Freetown. He asks how social value and inequality might be rendered in our bodies and the relationships to the landscapes we build. How have violent discrepancies within communities reflected the strained connections between ends and means? The IRCPL Fellowship will support ethnographic and archival research in Freetown, Sierra Leone, London and Oxford, England.
Devon Golaszewski is a sixth-year doctoral student in African history at Columbia University, and a candidate for the Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Institute for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on the history of gender and sexuality, and the history of medicine, in 20th century francophone West Africa. Her dissertation, entitled “Reproductive Labors: Reproductive Expertise and Biomedical Legibility in Mali, 1935-1999,” examines the intertwined and competing practices by which Malian families sought to ensure successful conception, pregnancy and childbirth in the context of high maternal and infant mortality. It traces simultaneously the development of biomedical maternal and reproductive health programs and the changing interventions of local specialists such as a birth attendants and nuptial counselors.
Owain Lawson is a PhD candidate in Columbia University’s Department of History. His research examines the history of technology, society, religion, political economy, and environment in the twentieth-century Middle East. He is senior editor of Arab Studies Journal and website editor for the Lebanese Studies Association. He is writing a dissertation that explores the history of the development of the Litani river in Lebanon between 1920 and 1978. The IRCPL Research Fellowship will support archival research in Paris and Nantes, France, in summer 2019.
Zehra Mehdi is a Ph.D. student at Columbia University’s Department of Religion, where she studies psychoanalysis, gender theory and religious and political identity of Muslims in India. She is broadly interested in the role of religion in the discourse of nationalism in India, history and memory, gender subjectivity, and subaltern narratives of resistance. Her dissertation is a psychoanalytic study of Muslims in India where she explores how Muslims resist seeing themselves as victims and forge their identity as Indians through the complex and delicate interplay of gender and religion. The IRCPL Fellowship will support archival research of Hindi and Urdu print media in north India to explore how the political rhetoric of Hindu religious nationalism produces specific images of Muslim men and women that inform the construction of Muslims as enemies of the nation.
Anna Reumert is a PhD student in Columbia University’s Department of Anthropology, where she focuses on the history and social life of Sudanese migration to Lebanon. She is broadly interested in relations of difference and religious identity as it pertains to histories of labor, migration and racialization in the postcolonial and post-Ottoman slavery context of the Arab Mediterranean. For her dissertation, she conducts fieldwork with a multi-faith Sudanese migrant community in Beirut. The IRCPL Fellowship will support the early stages of this research, to begin summer 2019.
Shaunna Rodrigues is a PhD student in Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. Her broad research interests include minority rights and democracy in post-colonial nations, Islamic praxis and justificatory discourse in modern South Asia, conjunctures between Muslim and Dalit political discourse in modern South Asia, anti-imperial political formations and thought, and iterations of Islamic law and political thought across the Indian Ocean. Her Ph.D. dissertation traces Islamic justifications of the Indian Constitution primarily through the work of Abul Kalam Azad and his interlocutors. The IRCPL Fellowship will support her research on tracing practices of justification against liberal imperialism undertaken by Islamic scholars like Azad. Focussing on Azad’s political life as a ‘jihadist’, interacting with various Muslim and non-Muslim critics of the empire within an Islamic world extending from Burma to Cairo, it will study how Azad used the concept of jihad, both in praxis and theory, to build an anti-imperial politics and a plural political conception for democratic India.
Summer 2018
Elizabeth Dolfi is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University in the North American Religions subfield. Her primary research interests include feminist and queer studies of American religious history, American evangelicalism, contemporary secularisms, and evangelical heterosexualities. Her current project is a historical and ethnographic study of the motivations, tactics, ideology, and theology of the Christian anti-human trafficking movement. She holds an M.A., M.Phil, and IRWGS Graduate Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies from Columbia University, an M.A.R. from Yale Divinity School, and a B.A. from Vassar College.
Joshua Donovan is a PhD student in Columbia University’s Department of History, where he focuses on the political, social, and intellectual history of the Modern Middle East. His broad research interests include the history and politics of identity in the Middle East, migration, imperialism, human rights, and religion. His dissertation traces the development of competing ideas of identity and nationalism within the Antiochian Greek Orthodox Community in the Levant and the broader diaspora during the first half of the twentieth century. This project is among the first to integrate the contributions of Orthodox Christians into existing scholarship on nationalism and sectarianism, and to place the most salient ideas nurtured by this community in a broader regional and global context.
Luciana Chamorro Elizondo is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her dissertation project investigates the ways popular politics have been reshaped by the return of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to power in Nicaragua, and in particular, by the politico-theological dimensions of Sandinismo that characterize president Daniel Ortega’s rule. Through ethnographic engagement with Sandinista militants as they navigate the vicissitudes of this new political landscape, the dissertation offers a novel perspective on how leftist popular movements in Latin America have sought a new basis for popular legitimacy after the decline of the communist utopia and the rise of neoliberalism. The project questions why so many of them have turned to idioms and political forms borrowed from Charismatic Christianity to mobilize the masses and reinvent a basis of unity for “the people”.
John Halliwell is a PhD student at Columbia University. John specializes in the economic history of the Middle East and Islamic economic philosophy. His dissertation delves into the ethos of debt in Islamic law within the context of medieval North Africa. While conventional debates revolve around whether the ubiquity of interest-bearing loans (outright or de facto) in Muslim societies represent a breach of the Quranic prohibition on usury, a creative reinterpretation thereof, or something in-between, John’s research puts aside this discussion to examine the dynamics of other kinds of debt which pervade legal discussion, from merchant capitalization of farmers to bodily injury to the bridal dowry to unlawful seizure of another’s property – all of which were articulated in the language of debt.
Selaedin Maksut is an MA student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His primary research interests include American Muslims and postcolonial theory. Selaedin is interested in Islam in the Balkans and the recent tensions between the long-standing Sufi orders and the newly imported Saudi sponsored clerics and institutions, especially in Macedonia and Kosovo. His project is about the aftermath of Kosovo’s war of Independence in 1999, since which the country has seen growing tensions between its traditional Sufi orders and the influx of well-funded Saudi-Wahhabi clerics, students, and institutions.
Tamar Menashe is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University, where she works on late medieval and early modern European and Jewish legal, cultural, and religious history and Christian-Jewish relations. Her dissertation explores the intersection of multi-confessionalism and the law in Reformation Germany through cases pertaining to religious conversion between Judaism and Christianity. Drawing on German legal sources, Jewish religious and legal sources, and literary writings of converts, Tamar examines how Christian and Jewish institutions and individuals grappled with contradicting jurisdictional claims, legal and religious reforms, religious toleration and persecution, and notions of minority status and women’s status.
Verena Meyer is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University where she studies the ways that Javanese Muslims understand religious authority of saints and reformer figures, how authority is negotiated theologically, and how it is deployed politically. She employs both ethnographic and textual methods, and draws on Sufism, Islamic reformism, Javanese literary traditions, and the wider currents of Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean Islam. The IRCPL fellowship will support research on Javanese religious literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the fall of 2018.
David Silverberg is an incoming PhD student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He is currently finishing his BA in the Department of Middle East, South Asia, and African Studies Department at Columbia. His research centers around questions of law, post-colonial theory, medicine, secularism, and ‘minority’ religion. His current project critically interrogates a 2015 Rajasthan High Court decision to criminalize a Jain end of life practice of fasting to death, called sallekhanā or sānthara, as suicide.
Yayra Sumah is a doctoral candidate in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS). She holds a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from Boston University. Her research focuses on Congolese (DRC) history, violence, healing, religious movements and the politics of masculinity and femininity. Her dissertation project seeks to rethink the legacy of colonial violence in Central Africa through a history of the Kimbanguist movement in Belgian Congo (1920-1969). By reconstructing the Kongo cosmological tradition which animated the search for healing, and by historicizing the process by which a movement which was initially religious became politicized through colonial military repression, her project seeks to enrich our understanding of the relationship between religion, politics and agency.
Summer 2017
Allison DeWitt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Italian and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her dissertation analyzes the use of geography in Dante’s Divine Comedy, specifically focused on representations of the Islamic world. It will be accompanied by a digital map to be hosted on Columbia’s Digital Dante site, for which she is an assistant editor. Her interests also include representations of Muslim women in literature, the gendered dimensions of spatiality and visualizations of literary geography. She holds a B.A. from New York University in German and Italian Literatures and an M.A. and M.Phil in Italian from Columbia.
Sarina Kuersteiner is a PhD student in medieval history at Columbia University’s Department of History. Her research focuses on the increasingly important role of notaries in the administration of public and private life in the medieval Mediterranean. Combining literary and legal sources, her research analyzes how ideas about spirituality, gender, family, social order, and the body itself worked together in the self-fashioning of medieval notaries to produce a system of thought and action in which men, through their reason, bodily awareness, and self control, acted as crucial servants of the common good. Sarina earned her BA from the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and her MA in German Literature and General History from Zurich, having spent her first year of the MA program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Ling-Wei Kung is a Ph.D. student in Chinese and Tibetan history. His research interests center on international legal practices and global economic exchanges between modern China and Inner Asia during the 18th-20th centuries. He is also more broadly interested in the roles of Inner Asian peoples, especially Tibetans, Mongolians, and Uyghurs, in the competitions between the Qing, British and Russian Empires. He is currently working on a research project entitled as “Between Religion and Power: Buddhists and Muslims in the Yadong Customs of Tibet, 1889-1914.” By paying attention to the roles of Tibetan Buddhists and South Asian Muslims on the borderlands between Tibet and India, this project shows that the diverse religious traditions in Tibet are important to rediscovering the globalization of modern China and the transnational networks in the Zomia region. In so doing, he primarily works with Manchu, Mongolian, and Tibetan documents, along with Chinese materials. Ling-Wei received a B.A. in History from National Taiwan University (2012), and his M.A. in Tibetan Studies from Columbia University (2015). Before coming to New York City, he stayed in Beijing, where he studied Chinese and Inner Asian history, as well as Manchu, Mongolian and Tibetan at Renmin and Peking Universities for two years.
Firat Kurt is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Focusing on the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, his current research explores the conjunction of financial capitalism, mass mobilization and political Islam. By paying close attention to personal histories, daily capacities, emerging hopes and inter-generational grievances of the party members and sympathizers, his dissertation investigates how material and financial changes facilitate and even promote a popular knowledge that religiously informed authoritarian politics, embodied by the AKP in Turkey, is the only solution for the predicaments of late capitalism.
Rohini Shukla is a MA student at the Department of Religion, Columbia University. She holds a BA from Fergusson College; a post-graduate degree from Savitribai Phule University, and a MA in philosophy from Manipal Center for Philosophy and Humanities. Her research interests are religions in South Asia, theories of secularism, ethnomusicology, Indian philosophy, gender, and Marathi literature.
Arthur Zárate is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. His current project is an intellectual biography of Muhammad al-Ghazali (1917-1996)—a classically trained Egyptian Muslim scholar, reformer, and one-time leading intellectual of the Muslim Brotherhood. Drawing upon a rich corpus of writings Ghazali published in mid-twentieth century Egypt, it traces the modern historical genealogies of classical Islamic techniques of ethical self-constitution—techniques that remain central the political projects of various Islamic reform movements today. It focuses specifically on how Ghazali not only drew upon the works of pre-modern Muslim ethicists to craft his theories of subject formation, but also texts written by American spiritualists, self-help pioneers, and metaphysicians.