RELIGIOUS STUDIES - Key Persons
Aaron Stalnaker, 2000, is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Adrien Stoloff, 2019, is Assistant Teaching Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Job Titles:
- Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities, Professor of History
Alexis is a fifth-year Doctoral Candidate in the Religion and Critical Thought track, entering the program after earning a dual B.A. in Religious Studies and Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008, and an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Colorado-Boulder in 2012. Her primary interests lie at the intersection of Human studies, Aristotelian moral philosophy, early modern Anglo-American ethical traditions, and constructions of the self within historical texts. Her current work focuses on issues of ethical formation and moral anthropology in the work of David Hume, and the conceptual roles of 'tradition' and 'history' within early modern Western philosophical thought. Her broad research interests include late medieval and early modern British and colonial American history, virtue ethics and its commentators, democratic theory, and political theology.
Job Titles:
- Research Fellow at the University of Antwerp
Andrew Flescher, 2000, is Professor of Family, Population, and Preventive Medicine and Professor of English, at State University of New York, Stony Brook. He is also core faculty in Public Health
Anna F. Bialek, 2016, is Assistant Professor of Religion and Politics, John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.
Arthur Urbano, 2005 , is Professor of Theology at Providence College.
Aseel is a graduate student in Islam, Society and Culture. She holds a BA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo. She is interested in the cultivation and expression of contemporary Muslim socio-political projects and ethical subjectivities, particularly in Egypt, and the ways in which these projects are produced in response to political circumstances, as well as ongoing textual engagement with premodern Islamic traditions. She has published "The Secular in Anglophone Scholarship on Premodern Islam: A Critical Historiography" in the HDS Graduate Student Journal (2021), and recently presented a paper titled "Blessed Be the Strangers: an Islamic Ethical Framework for Eschatological Times" at the Muslim Futurism Conference (2022)
Bailey is a second-year PhD student in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean track concentrating in Christianity in Late Antiquity. Her research focuses on the use of violence, sexuality, and trauma in late antique Christian literature. She is also broadly interested in theories of affect and embodiment. Before coming to Brown, she received an MA in Religion from Yale Divinity School.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Philosophy, ( RCT )
Job Titles:
- Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Scienc
Brian Rainey, 2014, is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.
Job Titles:
- Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities
Caroline Johnson Hodge, 2002, is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Holy Cross.
Celia is interested in topics that concern memory, storytelling, and ritual practice. Her thinking primarily engages the various intersections of religion and politics, Jewish though, political theory, and literature.
Job Titles:
- Visiting Assistant Professor
Chris DiBona, 2021, is a Deans' Faculty Fellow at Brown University.
Chris studies early Chinese intellectual history, with a focus on practices of self-cultivation, esotericism, and the body. His dissertation examines traditions of "biospiritual" practice (dietetic, gymnastic, sexual, and meditational regimens by which many sought to extend their lives and expand their powers) with particular attention to the concept of shen (often translated as "spirit"). He holds a BA and MA in Religious Studies from Stanford University and an MA from Harvard University's Committee on Regional Studies East Asia.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Political Science, ( RCT )
Curtis Hutt, 2007, is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, the Executive Director of the Goldstein Center for Human Rights, and the Director of Programming, Schwalb Center for Israel and Jewish Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Job Titles:
- Chen Family Professor of China Studies, Professor of History and East Asian Studies, ( ART )
Job Titles:
- II, 2021, Is Assistant Professor of Religion at James Madison University
Cyril Uy II, 2021, is Assistant Professor of Religion at James Madison University.
Daniel Picus, 2018, is Assistant Professor of Global Humanities and Religions at Western Washington University.
Daniel Ullucci, 2009, is Associate Professor at Stonehill College.
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature, ( RAM )
Job Titles:
- Professor Emerita of Classics
Debra Scoggins Ballentine, 2012, is Associate Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Rutgers University (NJ).
Donnell's research examines the dialogical relationship between faith and despair in relation to Protestantism's various, often disparate, ethical dispositions. His scholarship focuses on modern religious thought, historical philosophy, and the Black literary tradition. His primary research interests include philosophy of religion, religion and politics, religious ethics, and Black American religious traditions, emphasizing the intellectual histories of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Søren Kierkegaard. Donnell holds a B.A. in Sociology from Morehouse College and an MDiv from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. He enjoys reading, playing tennis, and listening to music in his spare time.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Comparative Literature, Professor of East Asian Studies, ( ART )
Elizabeth Cecil, 2016, is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University (FSU).
Erin Roberts, 2010, is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Religion at the University of South Carolina.
Job Titles:
- Visiting Assistant Professor
Job Titles:
- Professor of Religious Studies, Director of the Contemplative Studies Initiativ
Heidi Wendt, 2013, is Assistant Professor of Religions, Greco-Roman World, Department of History and Classical Studies, and School of Religious Studies at McGill University.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, ( ART )
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Director of Graduate Admissions
Job Titles:
- Wilbour Professor of Egyptology, ( RAM )
James P. Gubbins, 1997, is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Salem State College (MA).
James Swan Tuite, 2010, is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion University of Indiana - Bloomington.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies
Job Titles:
- Director of Undergraduate Studies, William a. Dyer Jr. Assistant Professor of the Humanities
Jeanne-Nicole Saint-Laurent, 2009, is Associate Professor in the Theology Department at Marquette University (WI).
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture, ( ART )
Jennifer Elizabeth Singletary, 2014, is Assistant Research Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at the Pennsylvania State University.
Jennifer focuses on modern philosophical and religious ethics, political theory, and Jewish thought. She is interested in questions at the intersection of political theology and ethical formation, concerning the relationship of absolute politics and such things as the attention, affective orientations, spiritual practices, and relationality of the self. Jennifer received an M.A. from the University of Chicago Divinity School prior to Brown.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Classics, ( RAM )
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History, ( RAM )
Josiah S. Bisbee is a graduate of Yale University, where he completed an MAR in Second Temple Judaism and is now a PhD candidate at Brown University as a RAM student, concentrating in Ancient Israelite religion. He has particular interest in the reception history and use of the Hebrew Bible in late antique Judaism, specifically in the fields of Rabbinic literature, so-called "Jewish Mysticism" and "Magic," as well as later use of the Hebrew Bible in Medieval "Jewish Mysticism" and Kabbalah. His current dissertation, tentatively titled "Innumerable Gods in Heaven: Divine Hierarchies from the Hebrew Bible to the Hekhalot Literature" explores various conceptions of divine hierarchies from AWA to late antiquity, while interrogating evolutionary theories regarding the so-called emergence of monotheism, as well as the "angelification" of YHWH's divine council and "demonization" of rival deities in the HB, Second Temple Judaism, and late antique/early medieval Jewish texts.
Judson Murray, 2008, is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Wright State University (Ohio)
Jung Lee, 2003, is Associate Professor of Religion at Northeastern University (MA).
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, ( ART )
Keith Green, 1992, Professor in the Department of Philosophy, and Director of the Program in Religious Studies, Eastern Tennessee State University.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies
Kerry Sonia, 2017, is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Colby College.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, ( ART )
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Classics and History
Job Titles:
- Visiting Assistant Professor
Laura Dingeldein, 2014, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Illinois - Chicago.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Distinguished Teaching
- Assistant Professor of Religion
Niki Kasumi Clements, 2014, is the Watt J. and Lilly G. Jackson Assistant Professor of Religion and Allison Sarofim Assistant Professor of Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities, Rice University (TX).
Job Titles:
- Professor of East Asian Studies, ( ART )
Job Titles:
- Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities
Job Titles:
- Professor of Philosophy and Classics
Matthew Day, 2003, is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University at Tallahassee.
Matthew Duperon, 2013, is Associate Professor of Religion, Susquehanna University (PA).
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology
Megan McBride, 2017, is a Fellow in the Division of Policy Translation and Leadership Development (working P/CVE and terrorism issues) at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health; and a Research Scientist for Strategy, Policy, Plans and Programs at CNA in Arlington, VA.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Political Science
Michael A. Putnam is a doctoral student in Religion and Critical Thought. His interests lie at the intersection of theory of religion, religious ethics, political theory, and the environmental humanities. His primary research explores the religious dimensions of environmental politics in the United States. Starting from the observation that American environmentalism has often been inflected with a certain religiosity, he examines how various paradigms for conceiving religion have accompanied environmental writing and activism. His other areas of interest include the religious ethics of American Romanticism, the relationship between religion and science, and critical theories of secularism. Before coming to Brown, Michael studied at Whitman College (BA) and Harvard Divinity School (MTS). He has received a Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Collaborative Humanities from the Cogut Institute for the 2019-2020 academic year.
Michael Payne, 2020, is a postdoctoral fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians University - Munich.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies
Job Titles:
- Chairman, English Department, the Masters School, Dobbs Ferry, NY
Mikail Berg is a PhD student in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean track. His work focuses on the intersection of race, ethnography and religion in the ancient world, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean. He completed his ThM at Vancouver School of Theology looking at the Syriac Short Recension of Ignatius of Antioch. Mikail also holds a MATS in the History of Christianity from Regent College (Vancouver, Canada) and a BA in Intercultural Studies with a concentration in the Middle East from Northwest University (Seattle, WA). He grew up in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys exploring the outdoors with his family and trying new recipes.
Muntazir is a Ph.D. student in Islam, Society, and Culture. He has a MSt. in Modern South Asian Studies from Oxford University and a post-graduate diploma in Islamic Studies and Humanities from the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. He is broadly interested in religious identity formation, orality and textuality in religious cultures and the role of space and place in religious traditions of ‘borderlands' in South and Central Asia from the 1600s to the present. His current research seeks to apply spatial theory and methodologies to colonial boundary-making strategies (boundary commissions, surveys, road building, trade regulation and production of ‘trans-frontier' information) in the ‘greater Badakhshan' region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to map entanglements of state actions with conceptions of religious space, self, and society.
Job Titles:
- Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Scienc
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Director of Graduate Studies
Job Titles:
- Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture and
Nathaniel DesRosiers, 2007, has received tenure and been promoted to Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College. Together with another Brown alum, Jordan Rosenblum, and Lily Vuong, have co-edited a volume, Religious Competition in the Third Century CE: Jews, Christians, and the Greco-Roman World (Vanden Hoeck & Ruprecht 2014).
Nechama Juni, 2021, is Assistant Professor of Religion at Carleton College (MN).
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, 2002, is Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University (NJ).
Nicholas Friesner, 2017, is Catalogue Librarian at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Job Titles:
- Academic Department Manager, Graduate Program Manager
Noah studies the intellectual history of the Jews of the medieval Islamic world. His dissertation explores conceptions of the ancient Jewish sacrificial cult among 10th-century Karaites as revealed in their Arabic Bible translation-commentaries
Patrick is a doctoral candidate in the ART program and 2023 dissertation fellow of the ACLS Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies. He earned his BA from George Mason University with a degree in History. He also earned a MA with a degree in Pre-Modern Chinese History from Xiamen University in Xiamen, PRC. Currently, Patrick's broader interests are in Buddhist intellectual and social histories in medieval China roughly between the 10th and 14th centuries. His dissertation investigates a Tiantai heresy and the formation of monastic communities based on textual practices during the Northern Song (960-1127).
Paul Firenze, 2013, is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies, Interim Director of Graduate Studies ( Spring 2024 )
Paul Robertson, 2013, is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire.
Job Titles:
- Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture and
Randy Friedman, 2005, is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies, and Director of the Center for Israel Studies at SUNY Binghamton
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History, Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, ( ART )
Job Titles:
- Falcasantos, 2015, Is an Assistant Professor of Early Christianity at Amherst College
Reyhan Durmaz, 2019, is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Pennsylvania.
Richard Wright, 1994, is Professor of New Testament, at the Graduate School of Theology, Abilene Christian University, Abilene, TX.
Rob holds a MA in Religion from Yale University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Religious Studies and a MA in Anthropology at Brown University. Broadly he is interested in the intersection of religion, politics, and violence, with specific foci on the history, culture, and heritage of ancient Israel and its environs during the 1st Millennium BCE. He also conducts research on the reception of Israel's heritage among modern day North American evangelical Christians, attending to issues related to Cultural Heritage and the relationship between ancient religious texts (especially the Bible) and modern politics. His dissertation is entitled "The Violent Imagination: Agency and Representation in Ancient Judaism and the Bible," in which he focuses on textual representations of violence in the books of Zechariah, Daniel, and Revelation. His thesis for the Anthropology degree is entitled "Evangelical Heritage in the Making: The Museum of the Bible in Anthropological Perspective."
Robyn Faith Walsh, 2014, is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Miami.
Job Titles:
- Professor Emerita of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies
Samuel Goldstein, 2023, holds a post-doctoral appointment at the Literature and Philosophy Institute of Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, for 2023-24.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of East Asian Studies, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, ( ART )
Job Titles:
- Judaic Studies and Professor
Job Titles:
- Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities, Professor of History
Shane Thompson, 2021, is Assistant Professor of Religion at North Carolina Wesleyan College.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Political Science
Shuangxia "Sunshine" Wu is a first-year PhD student in Islam, Society, and Culture. She studies the social and intellectual history of Muslims in early modern China. Her broader interests include lived religion, transnationalism, cultural translation, and minority studies. Sunshine received a BA in Religious Studies and Mathematics from Brown University and a MTS from Harvard Divinity School. She enjoys rock-climbing, making music, and watching the sunset.
Job Titles:
- Visiting Assistant Professor
Job Titles:
- Chairman, Professor
- Staff & Administration
Stephen Young, 2016, is a lecturer at Appalachian State University.
Susan Holman, 1998, is the John R. Eckrich Chair and Professor of Religion and the Healing Arts at Valparaiso University.
Tali is a fifth year PhD student in ART. She earned her BA from Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU), with a degree in Chinese language. She also earned an MA from BLCU in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language and an additional MA in East Asian Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Her intellectual interests are related to women's religious lives and religious praxis during the Song dynasty (960-1279). More specifically, she is interested in the interrelation of gender and religious spaces and places in the Jiangnan area (Southeast China) during the Southern Song (1127-1279). Her research employs a variety of sources including geographical materials such as local gazetteers,narratives from the Song's largest zhiguai (tales of the strange) collection, The Record of the Listener, as well as miscellaneous writings (biji) by Song literati. Some of the questions she is interested in are related to women's mobility through the landscape, their participation in religious meaning-making in relation to religious spaces such as temples and shrines, and the way in which gender relations might have shaped religious spaces and places (and vice versa).
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, ( ART ), Associate Professor of History, ( RAM )
Tanner Walker, 2021, will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan College (CT).
Tanvir Ahmed, 2021, is a research fellow at the Austrian Academy of Science's Institute of Iranian Studies. He is attached to Nomads' Manuscripts Landscape project.
Terrence Johnson, 2007, is Associate Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Georgetown University and faculty fellow at the Berkeley Center.
Job Titles:
- Dean of the Graduate School, Professor
Job Titles:
- Administrative Assistant, Undergraduate Program Coordinator
Tracy Coleman, 2001, is David Packard Professor at Colorado College.
Job Titles:
- W. Duncan MacMillian II Professor of History and Classics, ( RAM )
Job Titles:
- Assistant Curator, Asian Art, Rhode Island School of Design, ( ART )
Zhujun is a PhD student in ART. She earned her BA in Chinese Languages & Literature from Zhengzhou University, a MA degree in Chinese Folk Literature from Shandong University, and her Dual MA in Religious Studies and Asian Languages & Civilizations from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests mainly focus on religions, gender, vernacular practices, and print culture in Late Imperial China. She is currently wrapping up her research on the pilgrimage to the Goddess of Mount Tai (Bixia yuanjun), and has recently started exploring the cheaply printed pilgrimage maps of Mount Jiuhua in the late Qing and early Republican era.