The Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion (BCSR) has awarded summer grants in support of two exciting and innovative graduate student research projects. This year’s recipients were drawn from a very competitive pool of promising proposals received from an open call to UC Berkeley graduate students.
Melissa Cradic is a Ph.D. candidate in Ancient History & Mediterranean Archaeology. She is working on a dissertation entitled Transformations in Death: Funerary Practices and Personhood in the Bronze Age Levant, which investigates the role of ancestor veneration in the Canaanite funerary religion of the 2nd millennium B.C.E.Levant. With support from the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, she will travel to Israel and Jordan to conduct excavation at the project’s principal research site, Tel Megiddo (Israel), and visit twelve sites across the region for comparative analyses.
Jason Price, a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology, will be completing his ethnographic research for his dissertation, Holy Ghost Inc: Inside a Malawian Ministry of Deliverance. In the dissertation, Price traces the ways in which health and healing, identity formation and management, political commentary and contestation, entrepreneurship and investment, and aesthetics and cultural production are indexed and enacted in personal transformations at a Pentecostal ministry on the outskirts of a populous Malawian town.
Support for the 2016 BCSR Student Summer Research Grants is provided by the Frank and Leslie Yeary Endowment for Ethics in the Humanities.