CURA Fellowship 2024-2025
Each year, CURA’s Religion and World Affairs Fellowship program brings together an interdisciplinary community of Boston-area graduate students and faculty. Once selected, CURA Fellows gather on the Boston University campus for bimonthly colloquium sessions throughout the academic school year to workshop papers around a particular topic. The research theme for the 2024-2025 Religion and World Affairs Colloquium is Religion, Nationalism, and Internationalism.
Marsin Alshamary
She/Her
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Boston College. Faculty Affiliate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative
Marsin Alshamary is a scholar of Middle Eastern politics, with a primary focus on religious institutions, civil society, and protest movements. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled: A Century of the Iraqi Hawza: How Clerics Shaped Protests and Politics in Modern Day Iraq, which explores the historical and contemporary interactions between the Shi’a religious establishment and protest movements. Her research has been published in academic journals, including The Journal of Democracy, and she has provided commentary to various media outlets such as Al Jazeera and BBC. She has also consulted for organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank. As an educator, she teaches courses on religion and the state in the Middle East, state building and revolution in the Middle East, and civil society and democracy. She holds a doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and she is currently a faculty associate in the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program at Boston College. Her most recent publication is How Iraq is managing the Israel-Gaza crisis
Taylor Boas
He/Him
Professor, Department of Political Science
Taylor Boas is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Boston University. He is author of Evangelicals and Electoral Politics in Latin America: A Kingdom of This World (Cambridge University Press, 2023). His current research project looks at how religion influences the political attitudes of Latin American migrants to the United States.
Morgan Crago Melkonian
PhD Candidate, School of Theology, Boston University
Morgan Crago Melkonian is a PhD candidate at the Boston University School of Theology in the history of Christianity track. She works on the history of Protestantism in Latin America and the United States, with a particular focus on historic Protestant denominations and ecumenism in 20th century Brazil. Her dissertation analyzes the ways that Brazilian Protestant ecumenical leaders envisioned and articulated the social responsibility of their churches from the 1930s to the 1960s, investigating how their thought shifted from a philanthropic understanding of social action, focused on public health and literacy, toward an understanding that Christian social responsibility required participation in political revolution. She completed her MTS at Saint Louis University, where she studied global pentecostal and charismatic movements. Prior to moving to St. Louis, MO, she completed her BA in history and biblical and theological studies, as well as an MA in secondary education, at Covenant College near Chattanooga, TN. She is the co-Editor of Creative Collaborations: Case Studies of North American Missional Practices
Warren S. Goldstein
He/Him
Executive Director, Center for Critical Research on Religion
goldstein@criticaltheoryofreligion.org
Warren S. Goldstein, Executive Director of the Center for Critical Research on Religion (criticaltheoryofreligion.org), is the Editor of Critical Research on Religion (SAGE Publications) and Book Series Editor of Studies in Critical Research on Religion (Brill Academic Publishers and Haymarket Books).
Hannah Grace Howard
She/Her
PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology, Boston University
Hannah Grace Howard is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Her research seeks to understand the ways that the Orthodox Church of Greece has become imbricated in the overly-saturated Athenian aid landscape. Her dissertation, entitled Liturgical Care: Theological & Political Belonging in Athenian Greek Orthodox Charity, draws on both ethnographic data and theological reflection to analyze pious Orthodox people’s enactments of liturgical care – a form of relational care premised on theological commitments to love and iconicity that troubles the binary distinction between humanitarian philanthropy and solidarity work in Athens. For AY24-25, Hannah holds the Fordham NEH Orthodox Studies Dissertation Fellowship and the Lake Foundation Dissertation Fellowship on Faith & Giving.
Callid Keefe-Perry
He/Him
Assistant Professor of Public Theology, Boston College
Callid Keefe-Perry is Assistant Professor of Contextual Education and Public Theology at Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry. His scholarship engages themes of public theology, critical pedagogy, moral injury, and theologies of imagination and theopoetics. His most recent book is Sense of the Possible: An Introduction to Theology and Imagination
Candace Lukasik
She/Her
Assistant Professor of Religion and faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, Mississippi State University
Candace Lukasik is an Assistant Professor of Religion and faculty affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University, and currently a Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. Her research focuses on the transnational politics of migration, violence, and indigeneity in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Iraq, and its US diasporas. Her first book, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (NYU Press, forthcoming in 2025) examines how American theopolitical imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom in migration. Drawing on continuing fieldwork with Assyrians in Detroit and northern Iraq, her second book project, Somewhere Else: Political Ecologies and Indigenous Sovereignty in Global Assyria will trace the transnational formations of indigenous movements in the aftermath of the US occupation and ISIS/Daesh. She holds a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Syeda Rumana Mehdi
She/Her
PhD Student in the Department of Anthropology, Boston University
Syeda Rumana Mehdi is a second year PhD student in the sociocultural track at the Anthropology department in Boston University. Her research focuses on Pakistani women and the ways in which they cope with loss by visiting Sufi shrines in Pakistan. Through an ethnographic study of selected shrines, she hopes to explore why women frequent shrines, what rituals do they participate in and how they interact with other women and men. Rumana holds a Masters in Women and Gender Studies from University of York (UK) and a B.A in Liberal Arts from Bennington College.
Cody Musselman
She/Her
Preceptor, Harvard University
Cody Musselman is a scholar of American religion focusing on health, fitness, and capitalism. She earned her PhD in religious studies from Yale University (2022) and was a postdoctoral fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She is currently working on her first book Spiritual Exercises: Fitness and Religion in Modern America and is teaching at Harvard.
Jacques Michel Ngimbous
He/Him
Post Doctoral Fellow of the Boston College President’s Office, Boston College
Jacques M. Ngimbous obtained his doctorate in political science from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, 2023. He also holds two master’s degrees. One in Political Theology, the other in Political Science. His research focuses on the reconfiguration of relations between politics and religion in West Africa. He equally studies “discreet societies” (mainly Freemasonry – Rosicrucianism) and their relationships with the public and political spheres in francophone Africa. Jacques M. Ngimbous has an interest in the study of political crises in African countries with high religious observance. One of his publications is La rationalite communicationnelle comme voie feconde pour l’achevement du projet de la modernite chez J. Habermas
Dylan Renca
He/Him
PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology, Boston University
Dylan Renca is a doctoral candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Boston University where he is interested in multicultural and multireligious nationalism, personhood, and political belonging, particularly in Asia and the Muslim world. In 2022, Dylan received a $15,000 Fulbright-Hays award through the U.S. Department of Education in support of his dissertation fieldwork exploring how shifting policies of multireligious governance in the Republic of Indonesia are impacting Kejawen and Penghayat Kepercayaan communities whose traditions, passed down from ancestors, have been marginalized by much of Indonesian society in the years since national independence. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, Dylan completed a BA in English literature and religion at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont where he graduated magna cum laude. In 2014, Dylan served with the Fulbright U.S. Student Program teaching English in West Java, Indonesia.
Mónica Isabel Rey
She/Her/Ella
Adjunct Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Babson College and Wheaton College (MA)
Mónica Isabel Rey (she/her/ella) is an adjunct professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at Babson College and Wheaton College (MA). A feminist biblical scholar with a PhD in Religious Studies from Boston University (2024), her research focuses on the intersection of gender, genocide, and the Hebrew Bible (and its afterlives). Rey has published on the law of the foreign female captive (Deut 21:10–14) as genocidal rape in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and has an article forthcoming on just war theory in Deuteronomy in the Journal of Genocide Research. Rey is also publishing in The Bible and Violence (Bloomsbury T&T Clark) on Genocidal Language in the Hebrew Bible: A Reappraisal (2025) as well as a chapter on beauty in warfare in The Oxford Handbook of the Hebrew Bible, Gender and Sexuality (2024). Her first book, Gendering Genocide in the Hebrew Bible is forthcoming with Routledge in the book series Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible. Rey is a 2023-2024 Charles E. Scheidt Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention Faculty Fellow (Binghamton) and currently co-chair of the Feminist Studies in Religion Co Laboratory.
Sarah Riccardi-Swartz
She/Her
Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Northeastern University
s.riccardi-swartz@northeastern.edu
Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Northeastern University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she is trained as a historian, ethnographer, and filmmaker of American religion. She is the author of Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Authority in Appalachia (Fordham University Press, 2022).
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Merav Shohet
She/Her
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Boston University
Merav Shohet is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. She is author of Silence and Sacrifice: Family Stories of Care and the Limits of Love in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2021, winner of the Stirling Book Prize). Her research integrates medical, psychological, linguistic, and sociocultural anthropology to examine narrative and care, affects/emotions and silences, gender and intergenerational relations, ethics, suffering, and social change, and aging and the end of life in North America, Vietnam, and Israel/Palestine.
Laura Anne Thompson
She/Her
Raphael Morrison Dorman Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University
Laura Anne Thompson is a cultural anthropologist specializing in the study of Islam in North Africa and is currently a Raphael Morrison Dorman postdoctoral fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. She is interested in the study of blasphemy and hate speech, as well as comedy and curses, and in how arguments about emotion can support claim-making. Laura previously taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Boston University and Miami University of Ohio. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2022. She recently published a book chapter Protecting Muslims’ Feelings, Protecting Public Order: Tunisian Blasphemy Cases from the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries in Demystifying the Sacred.