2022-2023
Elvira Blanco is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, where she is also an instructor of record. Her scholarship lives at the intersection of cultural studies, film and visual studies, and political theory. Her dissertation, titled "Imaginaries of the Common in Contemporary Venezuela," analyzes works of cinema, photography, the visual arts, and media produced by activist groups that represent or enact practices of mutual aid and solidarity, resource-sharing, de-privatization, and collectively managing the reproduction of life and work––in short, practices of the common. With this research, she addresses three core topics that intersect with theorizations of the common: urban space, popular religiosity, and environmental devastation.
Chloé Samala Faux is a 7th year doctoral candidate in anthropology at Columbia. Her research interrogates the historical and emergent dilemmas of black reproductivity in post-apartheid South Africa. Oriented by the convergences of race and gender, violence and desire, the dissertation is rooted in and responds to the idioms of classical anthropology: myth, sacrifice, kinship, the gift, ritual and fetish.
Yuqing Luo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. Yuqing specializes in Song Dynasty (960-1279) history of religion, with particular interest in knowledge production, laicization, and gender relations. Her dissertation research intermingles historiographical texts and ethnographic descriptions of practices of "spirit writing" ("fuji") and explores the participation, preservation, and perception of this cultic activity in the "middle-period" China.
Zehra Mehdi is a seventh year doctoral student at the Religion Department working on the intersections of violence, trauma, mourning, and resistance. Her dissertation titled The 'Work of Religion': Trauma, Mourning, and Political Resistance is a psychoanalytic exploration of the ways in which Muslims, as persecuted religious minorities in India, articulate their oppression at the hands of the Hindu nationalist regime. Conducting extensive ethnographic fieldwork (2019-2021) in North India (old Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh) with Muslims during nationwide protests against the citizenship amendment act (CAA), her dissertation explores the ways in which Muslims actively use religion to pursue the psychic work of making sense of their traumatic experiences, and mourning their losses; this further allows them to reject the projective identifications of the persecutory nation-state, and thereby refuse their ‘political othering’ by demanding the recognition of their reality as equals. Along with the IRCPL Dissertation Fellowship 2022-2023, she has been awarded the 2021-2022 International Psychoanalytical Association research grant for dissertation writing.
Sonja Wermager is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology in the Department of Music. Her research focuses on intersections of religion and concert music in nineteenth-century Germany. Her dissertation examines Robert Schumann's late choral works against the backdrop of religious, social, and political change during the mid-nineteenth century. She has a forthcoming article on Schumann’s unrealized Martin Luther oratorio in 19th-Century Music and has also published on the English Reformation psalmody of Matthew Parker in the Yale Journal of Music and Religion.
2021-2022
Anruo Bao is a Ph.D. candidate of Yiddish studies and comparative literature from the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. Her academic interests include pre-modern Jewish mysticism, the literary presentation of the heretic experience, and modern Jewish literature. Now, she is writing her dissertation, The Saturnine Messiah: On the Image of Sabbatai in 20th-century Jewish Literature, which explores a 20th-century rise in interest in the life of Sabbatai Zevi, the 17th-century so-call Jewish messiah, on the part of Jewish writers.
Analía Lavin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the intersection of scientific culture, spirituality and secularization through the lens of the naturist movement at the turn of the twentieth century in Latin America. She holds an MA in Media Studies from New York University, where she was a Fulbright Fellow, as well as undergraduate degrees from Uruguay (Universidad de la República) and France (Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès).
Yea Jung Park is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Yea Jung specializes in Middle English literature, with particular interest in the intersections of social epistemology, affect, and rhetoric. Her research mines religious and secular medieval texts for their ways of imagining the process of extracting knowledge about the human interior from bodily comportment, showing how religious discourses such as discretio spirituum came to feed into daily processes of interpersonal judgment and social habits of mind.
Nick Tackes is PhD candidate in the Religion Department, with a focus on the intersection of Hinduism, health, media, and the environment. His research explores how large-scale religious institutions intervene in consumer culture in order to provide solutions to modern societal problems. Nick's dissertation project offers ethnographic analyses of two Hindu-adjacent groups--the Gayatri Pariwar and the Brahma Kumaris--and the social reforms, ritual practices, and branded goods they use to prepare for the end of the world as we know it.
2020-2021
Marina Alamo Bryan is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Columbia University. Her research attempts to understand what it means to find a murdered body in Mexico today, and what it means for it to become evidence of what and for whom. Building on anthropological scholarship on bureaucracy and forensics, her doctoral dissertation project examines the encounters of state authorities and communities searching for the disappeared, to interrogate how bodies in the ground are translated into terms of legibility and meaning. Her work looks at social processes of public truth production by bringing into conversation forensic and humanitarian exhumations, alongside recent critical perspectives on bureaucracy, bearing in mind longstanding approaches to the anthropology of death and the anthropology of the state, to address how dead bodies become evidence and how belief systems and truth claims circulate around and through them.
Roy Bar Sadeh is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University. His dissertation is an intellectual and socio-political history of the idea of a Muslim minority and its role in connecting Islamic modernists throughout South, West and Central Asia. Roy examines how between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries Islamic modernists in British India confronted, and redefined their categorization as “minority” by engaging with various intellectual and state building enterprises across empires and emerging nation-states in both the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Mashriq, as well as in the Soviet Union. Drawing on Arabic, Urdu, Russian, Persian, Hebrew, and English sources, he explores how this diverse group of Muslim intellectuals engaged with ongoing global debates about minority status and political emancipation.
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?
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.
Karim Malak is a sixth year PhD candidate at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, New York. His research focuses on the changes in colonial and postcolonial sovereignty through the introduction of secular governmental calculative technologies – such accounting, auditing and the census – during the Anglo-Egyptian colonial encounter of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Alexandra Méndez is a PhD Candidate in Latin American & Iberian Cultures and the Institute for Comparative Literature & Society. She specializes in early modern transatlantic cultural studies, Spanish and Italian historiography of the Americas, and book history. Her dissertation examines the exchanges of texts and ideas that conditioned the selection, translation, edition, and publication of historical texts about the Americas in early to mid-sixteenth century Venice. Reading letters, inventories, decrees, and printed books and paratexts, she analyzes the exchange between Spanish intellectuals and a group of individuals connected to Venice’s Library of St. Mark. She illuminates how library practices such as collections management and gatekeeping conditioned the way texts were selected and prepared for publication, and ultimately the way knowledge was curated and mediated for a public audience.
Verena Meyer is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Trained in Islamic Studies and specializing in Islam in Indonesia, her research focuses on the ways in which traditionalist and modernist Javanese Muslims construct and maintain their group identities through memory practices of authoritative founding figures and by appropriating canonical texts in Arabic, Indonesian, and Javanese. In addition to her ethnographic work on contemporary Islam, she has also explored themes of coherence and paradox as modes of theological articulation in classical Malay and Javanese poetry and their reception of Arabic philosophical traditions.
Margaret Scarborough is a PhD candidate in Italian and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She holds a BA in European and Middle Eastern Languages from the University of Oxford, in Italian and Arabic, and a Masters, also from Oxford, in Medieval Studies. Her doctoral research explores the heretical styles of existence of queer and feminist authors and activists in late cold-war Italy and their legacies. She draws attention to the ways that Pier Paolo Pasolini, Carla Lonzi, and others developed interpretation-based and process-oriented practices of selfhood by adapting and implementing notions and methods drawn from art, philology, linguistics, and new media. Her work draws on diverse sources, including screenplays, diaries, manifestos, and treatises of political philosophy, to trace an alternative genealogy for contemporary Italian Thought.
Yayra Sumah is a doctoral candidate in the department of Middle Eastern South Asian and African Studies. She holds bachelors and masters degrees in Political Science with a minor in African Studies from Boston University, magna cum laude. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a research focus on the history of colonialism in Congo (DRC), Kimbanguism, African Christianity and Central African spirituality. Her dissertation brings together history, anthropology, religion, philosophy and political theory in an original interpretation of Simon Kimbangu's movement in Belgian Congo. It considers the stakes of the meaning of Kimbangu for the postcolonial African debate on what it means to be 'decolonized' and 'African'.
2019-2020
Joseph Fisher is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He earned a B.A. (2013) from Franklin and Marshall College in Religious Studies before earning an M.A. (2015) and M.Phil. (2016) in Religion at Columbia. His training is in the fields of North American Religions and Philosophy of Religion with a focus on the intersection of religion, science, and technology. His dissertation research concentrates on the human enhancement debate in academic and public bioethics and how the concept of human nature operates within this discourse. Joseph's research is inspired by the ways in which bio- and neuro-technologies (real and speculative) shape understandings of what it means to be human and what it might mean in the future.
Sayori Ghoshal is a PhD candidate in Columbia University's Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies. Her research interests include political theory, intellectual history and the public life of concepts in modern South Asia. In her dissertation, she traces the genealogy of the religious minority discourse in late colonial and early postcolonial India. Based on archival and published materials, she studies the epistemological and political debates that produced the non-Hindu Other as the religious minority; and simultaneously, examines the intertwining of the religious with the biological as well as with the politics of enumeration.
Devon Golaszewski is a doctoral student in African history at Columbia University, and a candidate for the Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 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.
Andrew Jungclaus entered Columbia’s doctoral program in Religion in 2012 after receiving his BA in American Studies and English Literature from the College of William and Mary (2009) and his MA in Theology from the University of Oxford (2011). Before coming to Columbia, Andrew spent a year as a research associate at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research exploring the concept of theodicy within American civil rights struggles. Andrew’s dissertation, “True Philanthropy: A Religious History of the Secular Non-Profit Family Foundation,” focuses on the evolution of philanthropic models within a history of capitalism.
Dialika Sall is a PhD Candidate in the Sociology at Columbia University. Her research examines the integration experiences of the children of African immigrants, focusing on their racialization and acculturation. As an IRCPL Dissertation Fellow, Dialika will analyze how Christianity and Islam structure West African immigrant youth’s integration.