Fellows

Jacob Saliba is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Boston College specializing in modern European intellectual history. He holds an MA in political science from Boston College and a BA in Economics and Political Science from Ohio Dominican University. Saliba’s dissertation project explains how and why a set of Catholic, Jewish, and secular intellectuals successfully built mutual intellectual projects and created sustainable civic bonds during the social-political tumult of interwar France. Drawing on archival evidence together with published texts, it demonstrates that the period’s looming context of fascism, racism, and extremism produced new conditions of possibility for …

Ebtissam Oraby is an Assistant Professor at George Washington University. She is a curriculum and pedagogy scholar specializing in multilingual education and Arab and Muslim cultures. Her research interests lie at the intersection between philosophy, language, religion, and education, ultimately exploring notions of alterity and ethical possibilities in educational spaces. Oraby’s project is an ethnographic study of a social design experiment that explores the intersections of science pedagogy and Muslim epistemologies. The research questions how elementary school students engage with a philosophy of science curriculum rooted in Muslim ways of knowing. This project aims to address curricular and pedagogical equity

Trent Ollerenshaw is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. His research focuses on American racial and ethnic politics, public opinion formation, and political polarization. In his project, Ollerenshaw will pair computational text-as-data methods with a large sermon corpus to study how North Carolina Methodist pastors navigated political polarization and social tensions between 2020 and 2021. His analyses will focus on particularly salient socio-political issues during this period, including the COVID-19 pandemic, racial justice protests, and the 2020 Black Lives Matter Movement, the 2020 presidential election, and the January 6th Capitol riots.

Zehra Mehdi is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University and holds MA degrees in Clinical Psychology from Delhi University, India, and Religious Studies from Columbia University. She is a practicing psychoanalytic therapist working with religious and sexual minorities since 2010. Her research interests include psychoanalytic ethnography, anthropology of religion, religious nationalism, political violence, religious minorities, secularism, resistance literature, mourning, and Partition Literature. Mehdi’s doctoral project explores the psychoanalytic role of religion in the lives of persecuted minorities through an ethnography of Muslim ethical responses to Hindu nationalism.

Stephen Kapinde holds a Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Basel, Switzerland. He conducts interdisciplinary research cutting across religion, politics, democracy, gender and citizenship, reconciliation, and peacebuilding in Africa. Kapinde’s fellowship project is an interdisciplinary study on the complex dialectics between religion, spirituality, and democracy by repositioning the agency of Pentecostal movements as political agents in the quest for democratic renewal in conflicting democracies in Africa, particularly in Kenya. The project investigates how Pentecostal movements undermine or promote democratic renewal by investigating religious activities pursued by Pentecostal movements towards democratic processes and how the Pentecostal understanding of democracy differs

Seyma Kabaoglu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University and holds a BA in Economics and Sociology from Boğaziçi University. Her work is a long-term ethnographic study of politics of doubt and ethical finance in Turkey’s Islamic participation banking industry. By examining how people create inclusive spheres for economic activity from the analytical point of view of gender, class, and religious identity, her research aims to expand our understanding of the productive value of doubt in religious efforts for more democratic financial markets. Additionally, Kabaoglu is the host and content creator for two public humanities

Michael Edwards is a Smuts Research Fellow in South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge and will be joining the University of Sydney as a Lecturer in Anthropology in 2024. An anthropologist of religious life, media ecology, and political change, he received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics in 2019. His first book project, “Real Change: Myanmar and the Dissonance of Salvation” (selected for the Atelier series at the University of California Press) is about the encounter between Pentecostalism and Buddhism during Myanmar’s fraught and fleeting democratic opening. A second ethnographic project, supported by the RSDR fellowship,

Debadatta Chakraborty is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a graduate certificate in Feminist Studies. Her research interests include transnational authoritarianism, diasporic community formation, gendered-racial capitalism, political economy, and culture and media. Her dissertation focuses on the rise of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) in India and its connection to diasporic youth mobilization by centering the religious-nationalist politics of the Indian diaspora in the US and its connection to white supremacy. Combining global ethnography, archival work, and interviews in the US and in India, it contributes to understanding how youth at “home” and

Agana-Nsiire Agana is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Edinburg and holds an M.Th. in World Christianity from the University of Edinburg and a B.A. in Theological Studies from Valley View University in Ghana. His research draws upon Kierkegaard’s existentialist philosophy and empirical work in Ghana to advance a philosophical-theological investigation of personal identity construction among young Christians in the digital age. Specifically, he interrogates how social media culture shapes the construction of personal identity and selfhood, and how this relates to much-bemoaned crises of authority and authenticity in digital religion literature. During his SSRC fellowship, he will explore