Co-Directors

Carolyn Chen is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton 2008) and co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (NYU 2012). Her new book, Work Pray Code: When Work Replaces Religion in Silicon Valley, is about the transformation in work, religion, and community in late capitalist America. It will be published this spring by Princeton University Press.

Professor MacRae studies the religious history of the Roman world, particularly in the late Republican and early imperial periods. He has published on the traditional pagan religions of antiquity as well as on Judaism and early Christianity. His first book, Legible Religion, (Harvard University Press, 2016) argues that learned books that were written in the first century BCE by intellectuals like Varro, Cicero, Nigidius Figulus and a cast of Roman elites played an important role in the formation of the concept of “Roman religion”, particularly in the eyes of influential readers like the emperor Augustus and the bishop Augustine.

Advisory Board

Robert Braun combines archival work with geographical information systems to study civil society and intergroup relationships in times of social upheaval. He has recently finished a book, Protectors of Pluralism: the Collective Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, on the protection of Jews during the Holocaust in the Low Countries (forthcoming at Cambridge University Press). His new research project studies the political causes and consequences of anti-Semitism by exploring racial themes in German children’s stories. In the past he has worked on the geographical spread of different types of political violence such as terrorism, anti-immigrant attacks, and soccer hooliganism.

Mark Csikszentmihalyi writes on pre-modern Chinese thought, and is author of Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China and Readings in Han Chinese Thought. He began his career in the Department of Religion at Davidson College, and is editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions, former Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and was a contributing editor for the Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edition. At Berkeley, he teaches Confucianism and Daoism in the context of early Chinese society, chairs the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and co-founded the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

Charles Hirschkind is faculty in the department of Anthropology. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East, North America, and Europe. He gives particular attention to diverse configurations of the human sensorium, and the histories, ethics, and politics they make possible. His latest book, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in late 2020.

Niklaus Largier is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of German and Comparative Literature. He is affiliated with UC Berkeley’s Programs in Medieval Studies and Religious Studies, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Largier is currently working on two projects: a book on imagination, practices of figuration, aesthetic experience, and notions of possibility, tentatively entitled “Figures of Possibility;” and a book on the history of practices and the poetics of prayer (with David Marno).

David Marno’s work concentrates on the intersection between literature and religious practice, in particular on the relationship between prayer, meditation, spiritual exercises and poetry. He has published on religious and secular concepts of attention, on apocalypse as a literary and political figure, and on philosophy of history and comparative literature. His first book, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago, 2016), reads John Donne’s Holy Sonnets as a site where the bonds between premodern devotional, literary, and philosophical investments in attentiveness become visible. The question of when and why prayer requires attentiveness has led to Marno’s current project, which focuses on prayer in the aftermath of the Reformation.

Stefania Pandolfo studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world, investigating narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness and mental illness. Her current project is a study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of “traditional therapies” and psychiatry/psychoanalysis, exploring theoretical ways to think existence, possibility and creation in a context of referential and institutional instability and in the aftermath of trauma, based on ethnographic research on spirit possession and the “cures of the jinn”, and on the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital setting.

Jonathan Sheehan is an historian of early modern European religion, science, scholarship, and philosophy. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), and, with Dror Wahrman, of Invisible Hands: Self-Organization in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2015). His articles on secularism, Enlightenment, and early modern religious culture have appeared in Past & Present, the American Historical Review, the Journal for the History of Ideas, and Representations.

Ronit Y. Stahl is a historian of modern America. Her work focuses on pluralism in American society by examining how politics, law, and religion interact in spaces such as the military and medicine. Her book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017), traces the uneven processes through which the military struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism in the twentieth century. Her current research examines the rise of institutional and corporate rights of consience in health care. This project weaves together the court decisions, legislation, medical and bioethical arguments, religious ideas, and lived experiences that shaped the disparate trajectories of reproductive healthcare, LGBT healthcare, and end-of-life care from the 1970s to the present.

Staff

Affiliated Faculty

Kenneth A. Bamberger is the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Professor of Law at UC Berkeley. He is also faculty co-director of the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies, which hosts Berkeley’s Program on Jewish Law, Thought and Identity, and the campus’s Program on Israel Studies. Prof. Bamberger is an expert on the regulation of technology, expression, and privacy. He teaches courses on Administrative Law, the First Amendment (Religion and Speech), and Jewish Law.

Déborah Blocker specializes in the social and political history of literary practices in early modern France and Italy, with a particular interest in theater, learned societies (academies), the history of philology and the history of early modern aesthetics. Her research relies heavily on the history of the book, as well as on manuscript studies. Her first full-length study (Instituer un ‘art’: politiques du théâtre dans la France du premier XVIIe siècle, Paris, Champion, 2009) examined the social and political processes through which early modern French theater was instituted into an art (1630-1660). This project led her to develop a larger curiosity for the social and political constitution and circulation of discourses on poetry and the arts in early modern Europe (1500-1900).

Ben Brinner is professor emeritus in the Department of Music. Musical aspects of Muslim and Jewish religious beliefs and practices are central to his courses on music in the Middle East. He has conducted research in Indonesia and Israel since the 1980s. In addition to Playing Across a Divide: Israeli-Palestinian Musical Encounters, he has written two books on Javanese gamelan music and is currently finishing a third, dealing with expert memory for music.

Daniel Boyarin is Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, Emeritus faculty in the departments of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures and Rhetoric, Affiliated Member Department of Women’s Studies, Member of core faculty in the minor in Gay and Lesbian Studies and of the graduate group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, and the designated emphasis in Women, Sexuality, Gender Studies, as well as the core faculty of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. He was awarded with a Doctorate Degree in 1975 from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America upon completion of his dissertation on A Critical Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Nazir.

John Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History in the Department of History and specializes in the cultural and social history of German Jewry. His work has focused on German-Jewish engagement with medicine, anthropology, and antisemitism and he has written on subjects such as Jewish burial, circumcision, and dietary practices. His book Sephardic Beauty and the Ashkenazic Imagination: German Jewry in the Age of Emancipation, (2015) presents a study of modern German Jewry’s attraction to the aesthetics of medieval Sephardic Jewry.

Susanna Elm is Professor of History and Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, with a specialization in the social and cultural history of the later Roman empire. Her current interests focus on the relation between slavery and theology, especially in the work of Augustine of Hippo. Her works include Virgins of God: the Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity, and Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome.

Ruth Haber is the UCB Librarian for Religious Studies, Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Rhetoric. Ruth is here to support students and faculty in their work, and to help them find and use the Library’s diverse resources. As a UCB Religious Studies major and in her early doctoral work (in the UCB-GTU Joint Program in Jewish Studies), Ruth studied notions and practices regarding menstruation in traditional Jewish texts. Ruth’s later doctoral work and dissertation unfolded the motif, in classical rabbinic texts, of teaching “on the road,” delving into the genealogy of this “literal metaphor” of wisdom’s path.

Professor Hendel has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since 1999 and has served as chair of Jewish Studies, the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, and the Graduate Program in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. Hendel approaches the Hebrew Bible from a variety of angles – history of religions, textual criticism, linguistics, comparative mythology, literature, and cultural memory. He is the editor-in-chief of The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, a new critical edition of the Hebrew text, whose first volume (Proverbs, by Michael V. Fox) was published in 2015. He is also writing a new commentary on Genesis for the Yale Anchor Bible. In 1999, he received the Frank Moore Cross Publications Award from the American Schools of Oriental Research. His books include The Text of Genesis 1-11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition(Oxford, 1998), Remembering Abraham: Culture, History, and Memory in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2005), Reading Genesis: Ten Methods (editor and contributor; Cambridge, 2010), The Book of Genesis: A Biography (Princeton, 2013), Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (SBL Press, 2016), and How Old is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (Yale University Press, 2018).

affiliated faculty

Ethan Katz, Faculty Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, is a historian of modern Europe and the Mediterranean with specialties in modern Jewish history and the history of modern France and its empire. His publications include The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (co-editor, with Ari Joskowicz; UPenn Press, 2015), Colonialism and the Jews (co-editor, with Lisa Moses Leff and Maud Mandel; Indiana University Press, 2017). His new book project, tentatively titled Freeing the Empire: The Jewish Uprising That Helped the Allies Win the War, will chronicle the little-known story of an uprising in Algiers from 1940 to 1943 that proved vital to the success of Operation Torch.

Professor Larkin’s work is focused on Arabic literature, and in particular a subset of it that deals with the stylistic inimitability of the Qur’an (i’jaz al-Qur’an). Her first book (The Theology of Meaning: ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani’s Theory of Discourse) was on a major theorist in this field, ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078 or 1082), and she has taught seminars on i’jaz al-Qur’an a number of times. Larkin has also taught Introduction to Islam as the introductory course in the Religious Studies program here at Berkeley.

Rita Lucarelli is Assistant Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley and Fellow of the Digital Humanities in Berkeley. She is presently completing a monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt and she is one of the coordinators of the Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project. Her research interests include religion, magic and science in ancient Egypt and in Antiquity, ancient Egyptian funerary literature, demonology in ancient Egypt and Antiquity, Digital Humanities and Egyptology.

Emily Mackil (UC Berkeley Department of History and Chair, Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archeology) is a historian of the ancient Greek world who has written extensively about the development and nature of Greek federal states; the entanglement of religious practice and political power; the economic history of the Greek world; and most recently about property ownership.

Angela Marino received her Ph.D., New York University. Research areas are: Performance and Political Theory; Fiesta and Carnival of Latin/o America; Popular Performance; Theater History; and Latin American Studies. Marino is co-editor of Festive Devils in the Americas in Richard Schechner’s Enactments Series (Seagull Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2015) and is published in the Latin American Theater Review (2008), Harvard Revista (2014), e-misférica Journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (2013) and Cultural Anthropology (2014). She is currently writing a book on Populism and Performance. Marino is also advisor to the Teatro at Cal project and coordinator of the Luis Valdez Regent’s Lectureship in 2014.

Christopher Ocker is Professor of Church History at the San Francisco Theological Seminary. His monographs include Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge), Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany (Brill), and Johannes Klenkok: A Friar’s Life, c. 1310-1374 (American Philosophical Society) and most recently, Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (Cambridge). His many articles treat the history of biblical interpretation, the history of Jewish-Christian conflict, Reformation theology, and religious conflict in the Middle Ages. He was the coordinating editor of the two-volume Festschrift for Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Histories and Reformations (Brill), associate editor of the New Westminster Dictionary of Church History (Westminster John Knox), an editor of The Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, and a member of the editorial boards of the series Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions (Brill) and The Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

Doug Oman is an adjunct professor, where his research focuses on influences on health from spirituality and related psychological factors. He has taught Public Health students in Community Health Sciences, Maternal Child Health, and other areas of public health. He edited Why Religion and Spirituality Matter for Public Health (2018, Springer), and is the director of U.C. Berkeley’s traineeship on Spirituality and Public Health.

Dr. Bradley Onishi is a faculty member at the University of San Francisco and cohost of the Straight White American Jesus podcast. His writing has been published in the New York Times, LA Review of Books, and Religion & Politics, among other outlets. He holds degrees from Azusa Pacific University, Oxford University, and L'institut catholique de Paris, and he received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. A TEDx speaker and the author, editor, or translator of four books, Onishi's latest work is Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism - And What Comes Next (Broadleaf 2023).

Rahul Parson, assistant professor of Hindi Literature and Culture, received an MA and PhD in the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies, UC Berkeley, with a specialization in Modern Hindi literature. Before returning to the Berkeley in 2021, he served as an Assistant Professor of Hindi and Urdu at the University of Colorado, Boulder (2016-2020) and a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Postdoctoral Researcher) at Max-Weber-Kolleg, Universität Erfurt, Germany (2014-2016). Rahul Parson’s area of specialization is Hindi literature and literary history, with a particular emphasis on Hindi movements in Bengal. His book project, Confluences at the End of the Ganges: Modernity, Migration and Hindi Literature in Kolkata, fills in the Bengal portion of the map of Hindi studies. The monograph reveals the dynamism and syncretism of the hitherto overlooked world of Hindi literature in Bengal and the affective archives and narratives of migrants. It inaugurates research on the literatures of displaced and migrant peoples in South Asia by using cultural texts to explore the articulations of life-worlds of women and migrants. Additionally, he researches early-modern Jain poetry and philosophy, particularly the Jain adhyātma (spiritual or mystical) poetry. Dr. Parson participated as a core member of a research group based at the Max-Weber-Kolleg. In this capacity, he worked as a co-editor of a four-volume series entitled: Religious Individualisations: Historical Dimensions and Comparative Perspectives (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020)

Christine Philliou, professor of History and chair of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, specializes in the connected histories of the Balkans and Middle East since the 17th century, focusing particularly on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states out of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her books, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (2011), and Turkey: A Past Against History (2021), have been translated into both Greek and Turkish. She is currently working on a third book and developing a collaborative digital/public humanities project, the aim of which is a granular reconstruction and analysis of the Greek Orthodox communities in the larger context of late Ottoman Istanbul / Constantinople (1821-1923) using a wide range of Ottoman and Greek sources.

Diego Pirillo (Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore) is Associate Professor of Italian Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Center for the Study of Religion, the Institute of European Studies, the Program in Critical Theory, and in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies.He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, with an emphasis on Italy, England and early America. His research interests include religious studies, the history of books and readers, the history of diplomacy and international relations, and the history of scholarship and historiography.He has been a fellow at Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), and his work has been supported by many institutions (The John Carter Brown Library, The Hellman Foundation, The UC Berkeley Institute of International Studies, the Newberry Library, The Rare Book School at UVA, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, among others).Along with several articles and book chapters, he is the author of Filosofia ed eresia nell’Inghilterra del tardo Cinquecento: Bruno, Sidney e i dissidenti religiosi italiani (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010) and (with O. Catanorchi) of Favole, metafore, storie. Seminario su Giordano Bruno (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007).His latest book The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) .

Alexander von Rospatt is Professor for Buddhist and South Asian Studies, and director of the Group in Buddhist Studies. He specializes in the doctrinal history of Indian Buddhism, and in Newar Buddhism, the only Indic Mahayana tradition that continues to persist in its original South Asian setting (in the Kathmandu Valley) right to the present. His first book sets forth the development and early history of the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness. His new book “The Svayambhu Caitya and its Renovations” deals with the historical renovations of the Svayambhū Stupa of Kathmandu. Based on Newar manuscripts and several years of fieldwork in Nepal, he reconstructs the ritual history of these renovations and their social contexts. This book complements numerous essays Prof. von Rospatt has authored on various aspects of this tradition, including its narrative literature, and its rituals and their origins and evolution. He currently has two related monographs under preparation, one dealing with the mural paintings and other visual depictions of the Svayambhupurana, the other with the life-cycle rituals of old age as observed among Newars and other South Asian communities.

Aarthi Sethi's research interests broadly focus on the transformation of rural life-worlds and agrarian capitalism. Sethi's current manuscript, Cotton Fever in Central India, examines cash-crop economies to understand how monetary debt undertaken for transgenic cotton-cultivation transforms intimate, social and productive relations in rural society. With the introduction of genetically modified cotton-seeds, over a quarter of a million cotton-farmers have committed suicide in central India, unable to repay debts undertaken for capital-intensive agriculture. In order to grow GM cotton-seed, small-holder peasant producers are locked in downward debt spirals to banks, money-lenders and kin. The devastating psycho-social effect of debt and suicide emerges from a structural impossibility inherent in peasant production, which could be called ‘cash-cropping without cash’. The book is concerned with how economic imperatives come to inhabit social and personal temporalities.

Ethan Shagan is an historian of early modern Britain in particular and early modern Europe more generally. His work most often focuses on the interpenetration of religion and politics, and more broadly the contested space of religion in the early modern world. His most recent book, The Rule of Moderation (Cambridge, 2011), explored how and why the ubiquitous discourse of moderation, the golden mean, and the religious via media in early modern England functioned as an ideology of control and a tool of social, religious, and political power. In his current project, entitled The Problem of Belief in Early Modern Europe, he is exploring how the Reformations of the sixteenth century threw the category of “belief” into crisis, changing its meanings and forcing it to bear extraordinary new weight under which it eventually collapsed. This attention to the category rather than the content of belief, and his claim that belief was a problem rather than a stable backdrop against which other problems occurred, challenges the framework with which scholars have considered the emergence of “unbelief” while at the same time challenging any attempt to imagine “belief” in the past as an irreducible constant or a motor of historical change.

Robert Sharf is D. H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a B.A. in Religious Studies (1979) and an M.A. in Chinese Studies (1981) from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Michigan (1990). His graduate work included study in Japan; he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Research into the Humanities (Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo) at Kyoto University, and also conducted fieldwork at Kōfukuji in Nara (1985-87). He works primarily in the area of medieval Chinese Buddhism (especially Chan), but he also dabbles in Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art, ritual studies, and methodological issues in the study of religion.

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies. She is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021), Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2008), and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, 1992). She is also director of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies.

Francesco Spagnolo, a multidisciplinary scholar focusing on Jewish studies, music and digital media, is the Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and a Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a host for the cultural programs of Italian National Radio (RAI) in Rome. His research interests include the study of liturgy (texts, sounds, music, architecture, material culture, body language) and synagogue life in the global Jewish Diaspora, with a particular focus on Italy and the Mediterranean since the early-modern period; the emergence of Jewish musical revival movements in Europe since the 19th century; and music in Israel.

Professor Swidler works in Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Religion, Political Sociology, and Global and Transnational Sociology. Her research has focused on American religion (co-author, Habits of the Heart) and on religion and chieftaincy in Malawi. She is currently engaged in a project examining how Christian and Muslim congregations in Malawi link villagers to wider social and sacred realities. Her work examines what services congregations provide, how Malawians understand the theological and practical offerings of different religious traditions, and why Malawians switch congregations, denominations, and even faith traditions with some frequency.

Ivonne del Valle is Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Associate Professor of Colonial Studies. Her research and teaching make connections between the past and the present which try to show the relevance of the colonial period for an understanding of contemporary times. She was co-director of the Berkeley research group “Mexico and the Rule of Law.” She has written a book and a series of articles on the Jesuits (José de Acosta and Loyola, and Jesuits in the northern borderlands of New Spain) as a particularly influential politico-religious order that served modernization and the expansion of the Spanish empire. She is currently working on two projects: one on the drainage of the lakes of Mexico City, and the other on the role of the colonization of Spanish America from the 15th century onward in the development of new epistemologies and political theories. In the latter she is exploring the ways in which both the unprecedented violence of conquest and colonization, and the need for effective administration of the colonies, brought about important theoretical, technological, and epistemological changes which may have been conceived to be put in place in the colonies, but which in the long run transformed the way Europe understood and fashioned itself.

Emily Zazulia is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music. Zazulia's research focuses on Medieval and Renaissance music—in particular, the intersection of musical style, complex notation, and intellectual history. Zazulia's first book, Where Sight Meets Sound: The Poetics of Late-Medieval Music Writing (Oxford, 2021), is a wide-ranging study of notational aesthetics in polyphonic music, ca. 1340–1510. For fifteenth-century composers, musical notation assumed a significance that would not be matched until the 20th century. In telling this story, Zazulia accounts for changes in thinking about music theory that made possible later modes of composition so invested in music’s written form. By reconsidering the role of notation, Zazulia engages with questions of performance, transmission, ontology, and a late-medieval aesthetics that includes sight as well as sound. Some of my current projects include the nature and meaning of difficulty in fifteenth-century music, repertories that cross the boundaries of the “sacred” and “secular”, “courtly” and “popular”, and in particular the ways they unsettle those categories. Zazulia's past publications have focused on the role of obscenity in 15th-century song, the L’homme armé tradition, the history of music theory, and Du Fay’s Nuper rosarum flores.

Post-Doctoral Scholars

Yunus Doğan Telliel is the Berkeley Postdoctoral Fellow in Public Theology for the 2017-18 academic year. He recently completed his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York – Graduate Center. He serves on the steering committees of the “Contemporary Islam” and “Science, Technology, and Religion” groups in the American Academy of Religion. At BCSR, Telliel will be working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled What is the Language of Islam?, in which he examines the politics of secularism and religious difference in Turkey, through the lenses of language and translation. He also has a long-standing interest in debates around science and religion, and will be completing an article charting possible future collaborations between science and technology studies and critical secularism studies.

Research Associate

Steven Barrie-Anthony (PhD, PsyD) is a 2021–2027 BCSR Research Associate.

Barrie-Anthony is a scholar of religion and a research psychoanalyst with a clinical practice in the Bay Area. He holds doctorates in Religious Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara), and in Psychoanalysis (Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis). Barrie-Anthony’s research approach brings together contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice with religion scholarship. He is particularly interested in exploring emerging social and civic groups among the religiously non-affiliated and the “spiritual but not religious.”

Barrie-Anthony is the founding Director of Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a multidisciplinary research initiative examining the impacts of technologies on human relationships. The initiative is based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Barrie-Anthony’s work examines the way technologies are shifting how humans relate to each other—what it means to be human and to be present with others—and how religion is ideally suited to help us understand and navigate these shifts.

Graduate Students

Visiting Scholars

Dr. David Kyuman Kim is Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion at the University of California, Berkeley and Founder of Radical Love Productions, a media and consultancy company dedicated to creating content that speaks to the most important moral issues about what it means to be human, specifically around questions of race, democracy, and justice. Most recently he served as Executive Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. For nearly twenty years, Dr. Kim was Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Connecticut College, where he founded the first center on race and ethnicity at a liberal arts college. He has held appointments at Brown, Stanford, UPenn, Union Theological Seminary, the Graduate Theological Union, UC Berkeley School of Law, and the Social Science Research Council, where he served as a Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large of The Immanent Frame, the SSRC’s online platform on secularism, religion and public life. Author of Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics (Oxford 2007) and co-editor of The Postsecular in Question and Race, Religion, and Late Democracy, he is widely published in the fields of religious studies, Asian American studies, poltical theory, and race and democracy. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Truthout, and The Immanent Frame. His podcast and book The Public Life of Love are in development. A food and wine enthusiast and classically-trained musician, he lives in Oakland, CA.

Valentina Napolitano is Professor of Anthropology, a Connaught Scholar and a former Director of the Latin American Studies program at the University of Toronto. She works on Critical Catholic Studies as well as on anthropology of affects, borderlands and migration, and has a particular interest in political theology, affective histories, anthropology of traces, mysticism and politics, and the work of Michel de Certeau. She is a co-recipient (with S. Coleman) of a Connaught Global Challenge Award for a project on Entangled Worlds: Sovereignty, Sanctities and Soil and the author of two ethnographic monographs: Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church (FUP, 2016, Finalist Geertz Prize of the Society for Anthropology of Religion) and Migration, Mujercitas and Medicine Men: Living in Urban Mexico (UCP, 2002). She is also the co-editor (with K. Norget and M. Mayblin) of The Anthropology of Catholicism: a Reader (UCP, 2017), and has authored many articles and special issues including with C. McAllister Theopolitics in/of the Americas (Social Analysis, 2020).

In the period visiting the Berkely Center for the Study of Religion, Valentina will be working toward a book manuscript on Mystico-Politics for the 21C. Within the extensiveness of Christianity mystical archives, apophatic theology and socio-cultural anthropology, her project asks how they might mutually interpellate, in an historicized way, while being seeds for radical social experiments and micro practices. Her project recognizes that mystical archives and their sensory aesthetics can unsettle humanitarian logics of moral hierarchies evoking, instead, spaces of rupture, new forms of habitation and dwelling, and hermeneutic un-closure and dis-imagination. She is particularly interested in working on how current migratory and denizenship phenomena might be intimately connected to mystical archives and radical social practices.

Anna Hennessey is a San Francisco author and scholar whose work explores the religious, artistic, and philosophical dimensions of birth. Her recent book, Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology Between the Sacred and the Secular (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) explores ways in which religious imagery is secularized and re-sacralized during the contemporary rituals of birth. Anna’s work is highly interdisciplinary; she has a PhD in the History of Chinese Religions from UC Santa Barbara, an MA in Art History from UC Santa Barbara, and a BA with a double major in Philosophy and Romance Language from New York University. She is currently working on three projects. The first is a book project that considers a wide range of artworks used within various birth communities to visualize the process of birth as both a physiological and sacred event. The second is a community project in San Francisco developed over the past two years and devoted to the creation of a Birth Circle for low-income women, and especially low-income women of color who live in public housing. As part of the project, Anna is collecting birth stories and creating a web archive of these histories. The third, also a book project, takes a broad look at how art about birth and genesis interact or influence cultural or national identities. She is especially interested in this topic as it relates to Catalan art and representations of rebirth in the wake of cultural turmoil.

Udi Greenberg studies and teaches modern European history, intellectual history, and international history. His scholarship and teaching focus especially on the intersection of ideas, institution building, and Europe’s interactions with the world. His work has been supported, among others, by the ACLS, Mellon Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the DAAD.

His first book, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2015), traces the intellectual, institutional, and political journey of five influential political theorists from their education in Weimar Germany to their participation in the formation of the Cold War. It argues that both Germany’s postwar democratization, and the German-American alliance, were deeply shaped by these émigrés’ attempts to revive intellectual, religious, and political projects first developed in Weimar Germany. In 2016, it was awarded the Council of European Studies’ Book Prize (for best first book in European studies 2014-2015). It also appeared in German, Korean, and Hebrew translations.

He is currently working on a second book-length project, tentatively titled Religious Pluralism in the Age of Violence: Catholics and Protestants from Animosity to Peace 1885-1965. This project explores the intersections between twentieth-century religious thought and global politics. It investigates how transformations in global politics–the rise of Nazism, the unfolding of the Cold War, and the the process of European decolonization in Asia and Africa–helped fascilitate the end of the prolonged religious animosities between Protestants and Catholics.

His articles (mostly related to these two book projects) have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Historical Review, Journal of Modern History, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Journal of Contemproary History, among others. He has also published several essays on politics, religion, and history in The Nation, Dissent, Boston Review, L.A. Review of Books, n+1 and elsewhere.

At Dartmouth, he teaches a wide variety of classes on modern European and international history. In 2016, he was elected by the senior class as Dartmouth’s best professor, and was awarded the Jerome Goldstein Award, Dartmouth’s top teaching prize.

Sarah Bakker Kellogg (Ph.D. University of California, Santa Cruz, 2013) is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersection of religion, politics, and the performing arts. Using the methodological tools of sound studies and the anthropology of voice, she conducts on-going ethnographic fieldwork among Middle Eastern Christian refugees and immigrants who have settled in the Netherlands. This research has yielded several distinct projects, on which she has presented and published widely. These projects include investigations into Dutch secularism’s roots in anti-Enlightenment theocracy; racialization as the ethics and aesthetics of religious difference in Europe; gender, kinship, and ethics in the Syriac liturgical tradition; the secular construction of the category “ethnicity,” and the politics of intra-Christian and inter-faith activism globally. She has previously taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at San Francisco State University. During the 2017-2018 academic year, she will be completing her book manuscript, Liturgical Song in an Age of Political Calamity: Registers of Recognition in the Syriac Christian Diaspora, with funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship. Representative publications can be found here. link: https://berkeley.academia.edu/SarahBakkerKellogg

Andrea Vestrucci (Ph.D., University of Milan; Ph.D., University of Lille) has served as Professor at the Federal University in Fortaleza, Brazil; Australia Award fellow of Monash University; and researcher of the University of Milan. Currently a member of the Eric Weil Institute in Lille, he has recently completed a major research project in systematic theology for the University of Geneva.

His scientific commitment embraces both philosophical and theological speculations.

Concerning philosophy, he is a scholar of Kant and Neo-Kantianism (H. Cohen, E. Weil), and of the Hungarian Kreis called “Budapest School” (G. Lukács, A. Heller, F. Fehér, G. Markus). His philosophical research focuses on transcendental logic, meta-ethics, the ethics-aesthetics relationship, and philosophy of right.

Concerning theology, he deepened Martin Luther’s concept of freedom and its contemporary interpreters (and critics). His theological research focuses on the issue of theological language, the relationship between human meaning and divine revelation, and the rapport (and difference) between theology and philosophy.

Jason S. Sexton is a BCSR visiting fellow through June 2018. He has taught at Cal State Fullerton for the last three years, where he is the Pollak Library Faculty Fellow and edits the UC Press-published, Boom California. He holds the Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews, and has written widely in the areas of California studies, prison studies, religious studies, and contemporary theology. He has written The Trinitarian Theology of Stanley J. Grenz (Bloomsbury) and edited Theology and California: Theological Refractions on California’s Culture (Routledge). He is currently writing a book that gives an interdisciplinary theological account of the incarcerated church.

I took a degree in Law (1999) and in History (2003) and I completed my PhD in Early Modern History (2006) at the University of Trieste. I have held fellowships from Alpen-Adria Universität (Klagenfurt 2006), Karl-Franzens Universität (Graz 2007), Max Planck Institute for Legal History (Frankfurt am Main 2013) and I have been visiting Scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris 2016). Since 2008 (2011 full-time) I am researcher at the Bruno Kessler Foundation, Italian German Historical Institute. As adjunct professor, I teach a course in in History of Historiography at the University of Trent (2014 Atlantic History, 2015 Food History).
My broad areas of research are religious history in the early modern age, Jesuit studies and food history.

My current research explores the historical concept of Patchwork Religion as a spiritual experience characterized by the coexistence of elements from different traditions, religions, exoteric and spiritual movements. In this field of research, I am especially interested in history of food and food habits (ecclesiastical fast, table behaviors, beverages and drunkenness) as essential features of the negotiation between individuals and cultural models.

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