Past Fellows « Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life

Past Fellows

Graduate Fellows, who received summer travel stipends to conduct research for their doctoral dissertations, include:

Susan Andrews, Department of Religion, “Replicating Replicas: The Conjured Temple and the traditions of Mount Wutai”
Maham Mela, Department of Anthropology, “Education Enrollment Decisions: A Case Study of Pakistan.”
Charles Lawry, Department of Music, “Rebuilding a Global City / Ghost Town: New Architecture and Denizens of Icelandic Soundspace.”
Sara L. Snyder, Department of Music, “Poetics, Performance, and Politics: Cherokee Language Revitalization and Expressive Practices on the Qualla Boundary.”
Elizabeth Sperber, Department of Political Science, “Meltzer and Richard in 3-D: Religion and Redistributive Preference in Rural Uganda.”

Undergraduate Fellows, who received summer travel stipends to conduct research for their senior theses, include:

Carolina Brito, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, “Beyond Housing: Religion, Social Capital and the Construction of Citizenship in São Paulo’s Peripheral Settlements”
Ariel Pollock, Department of History, “Confronting Injustice: South African Jewry and Apartheid in the 1970s.”
Katherine Rooney, Department of Asian and Middle East Cultures, “Wearing the Buddha: The Sale and Purchase of Buddhist Objects in Contemporary Urban China.”

Graduate and Undergraduate Research Assistants, who received grants to assist professors in their fields, include:

Maham Mela, Department of Anthropology, is writing on “Education Enrollment Decisions: A Case Study of Pakistan” and assists Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.
Emily Cochran Bech, Department of Political Science, assists Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology.
Matthew Vaz, Department of History, is writing on “The Rise of State Lotteries and the Supression of Popular Numbers Gambling in New York City and Rio de Janeiro” and assists Courtney Bender, Professor of Religion.
Schlomo Bolts, Department of Political Science, is writing on “Reviving the Faith, Reinventing the State: Israeli and Turkish Religious Parties in an Era of Globalization” and assists co-director Alfred Stepan.
Sarah Layton, Department of Comparative Literature and Society, is writing on “Speaking As…? The Struggle Against Subaltern Classification in Beur Literature” and assists Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science.
Chloe Smith, Department of History, is writing on”Ladies and Females: Women’s Missionary and Educational Work in Early Nineteenth Century India” and assists Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures.

Graduate Fellows, who received summer travel stipends to conduct research for their doctoral dissertations, include:

Elizabeth Bonnette, Department of English and Comparative Literature, “Remembering Things: Transformative Objects in Community Conflict.”
Bina Gogineni, Department of English and Comparative Literature, “God and the Novel in India.”
Seema Golestaneh, Department of Anthropology, “Sufi Zikr Practices in Iran.”
Dahlia Gubara, Department of History, “Trajectories of Learning and the Everyday Life of Ideas: Al-Azhar in the Eighteenth Century.”

Undergraduate Fellows, who received summer travel stipends to conduct research for their senior theses, include:

Eric Hirsch, Department of Anthropology, “Governance and Cultural Performance: Community Organization, Political Recognition and the Catholic Church in Peru.”
Rudi Batzell, Department of History, “Religious Toleration and State Formation in Empires.”
Shir Alon, Department of Comparative Literature and Society, “A Comparative Study of Language, Memory and Forgetting.”
Shuli Shinnar, Department of Religion, “Religious Discourse in the Public Sphere.”

Undergraduate Research Assistants, who received grants to assist professors in their fields, include:

Lena Friedrich, Department of Sociology, assisted Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology, and wrote on “Entanglement of Religion and Public Life in Western Europe.”
Nicholas Kelly, Department of Political Science, assisted Alfred Stepan, co-director of IRCPL, and wrote on “Democratic Theory and the Place of Religion”
Neha Nimmagudda, Department of Political Science, assisted Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, and wrote on “Religious, Cultural and National ideologies in India and South Africa.”
Stephanie Russell-Kraft, Department of Comparative Literature and Society, assisted Karen Barkey, Professor of Sociology, and wrote on “Immigrant Literary Traditions in Germany and France.”
Rajiv Sicora, Department of History, assisted Courtney Bender, Professor of Religion, and wrote on “Diplomatic and Missionary relation between the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy and the Quakers in Colonial New York.