Current Students

Kristi Woodward Bain is a doctoral candidate in Medieval Christianity and History. Her primary interests are conflict, community identity, and collective memory in late medieval English parishes. Kristi's other research interests include late medieval German parish life, lay enactment of religious reform, and women's religious and secular activities within the parish community. Recent awards include the DAAD Intensive Language Grant and the Northwestern University Graduate Research Grant.  Her advisor is Richard Kieckhefer.

Amanda Baugh is a doctoral candidate in American Religion.  Her dissertation, "Faith in Place: Greening Chicago Religious Communities" is an ethnographic study of interfaith environmental efforts throughout the Chicago area.  Amanda has teaching experience in Religious Studies and Gender Studies, and is part of Northwestern's Gender Studies certificate program.  She is a co-chair in the Religion, Ecology, and Culture section of the Midwest American Academy of Religion.

Rahma Bavelaar is a doctoral candidate in the Islamic in Africa track. Her research focuses on the intersections of religious authority, Islamic education, transnational networks and the challenges of diasporic life in the Somali diaspora. Her other research interests include Islamic in Africa, modern Islamic reform movements, Sufism and debates around Islam and secularism.

Stephanie Brehm is a doctoral student in American Religions. She is interested in using ethnographic, historical, and cultural analysis methodologies to study the intersection of 20th and 21st century American religious history and popular culture. Before coming to Northwestern, Stephanie graduated with a B.A. from Florida State University and a M.A. from Miami University. Her advisor is Professor Orsi.

Jennifer Callaghan is a doctoral student in American Religions interested in historical and ethnographic methods.  Her primary research interests are American conservative Catholics and the development of the study of religion. Her advisor is Robert Orsi.

Shuman Chen is a doctoral candidate in the "Buddhism in Its Asian Context" track. She is interested in Chinese Buddhism, specifically in Tiantai philosophy. She is also a member of the Asian Studies Cluster. Her most recent publication, "Chinese Tiantai Doctrine on Insentient Beings' Buddha-Nature," will so be published in Chung-Hwa Buddhist Studies (Taipai). Her advisor is George Bond.

Brian Clites is a doctoral candidate in American Religions.His work combines ethnography, American history and theories of religion and power. He is currently writing his dissertation Pro-Change Catholics: Grassroots Activism

and the Politics of Sex Abuse. Recent awards include the Francis X. Keenahan Teaching Award and the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (FLAS). Brian is also Chair of the History of Religions Section for the Midwest American Academy of Religion. His advisor is Robert Orsi.

Matthew John Cressler is a doctoral candidate in American Religions. His primary research interests are African American and American Catholic religious histories as they intersect with conceptions of the American nation. His dissertation is an examination of African American Catholics in Chicago from the great migrations to the Black Power era. Matthew received the American Catholic Historical Association's fourteenth annual John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award. His advisor is Robert Orsi.

Vanessa Crosby is a doctoral candidate in the Medieval Christianity track. Her second department is Art History, and her primary research interests are medieval sacred architecture and devotional art, particularly in Spain and the Mediterranean region.

Kristin Doll is a doctoral candidate in Religion, with a concentration in Medieval Christianity.  She is currently doing research for a dissertation on church fires and reconstruction in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France.  Her other research interests include church architecture, high medieval Marian devotion, and pilgrimage.

Kate Dugan is a doctoral student in American Religions. Kate's areas of interest are American Catholicism and women in religion. She hopes to use historical and ethnographic methods in her work. Her advisor is Robert Orsi.

Joshua Feigelson studies the relationship of religion and American higher education. He is also the Campus Rabbi of Northwestern University Hillel. He lives in Evanston with his wife and two young sons.

Hayley Rose Glaholt is a doctoral candidate in Religion, Ethics, and Public Life, focusing on religious animal ethics. Her research addresses lived ethics, engaged religion, religious perspectives on nonhuman animals, gendered ethical theory, and the self-definition of communities.  She is interested in the nineteenth century  as a time of religious diversification, particularly the relationships between spirituality, food, utopianism, and agriculture. Hayley's dissertation, titled Violence in Healing: Nineteenth Century Quakers Debate the Morality of Animal Vivisection, Gender, and Medicine in the Earthly Peaceable Kingdom, investigates the ethical boundaries of the Quaker peace testimony using nineteenth-century Friends' debates surrounding vivisection (live experimentation upon animals) as a central theme.  It questions the species-barrier of religious pacifism and argue that Quakers briefly expanded their moral community between 1870 and 1914 by conceptually acknowledging and condemning both inter-species and intra-species violence.  Recent awards include 2010-2011 Graduate Fellow, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities (Northwestern Unversity), 2010 New England Regional Fellowship Consortium Grant, 2010 Gest Fellowship (Haverford College), 2010 Culture & Animals Foundation Grant, 2010 Weinberg technology-Enhanced Doctoral Research Award (Northwestern University), and the 2009 Human-Animal Studies Fellowship (Animals & Society Institute, Duke University). Her advisor is Cristina Traina.

Alyssa Henning is a doctoral student in Religion, Ethics, and Public Life; she is also pursuing a law degree through Northwestern's JD/PhD program. She has wide-ranging interests in bioethics, but is particularly interested in Jewish bioethics, the role(s) of religious perspectives in American bioethics discourse, and bioethics policy-making.

Tina Howe is a doctoral candidate in Religion, Ethics, and Public Life, specializing in the areas of Islamic family law, Islam in America, and Islam in North Africa.  She is also interested in broader theories of gender, secularism, and religious authority.  Her master's theses showed how Muslim reformers in mid-twentieth-century Morocco appropriated Islamic family law into their discursive arguments for national unity and modernization.  Tina's dissertation, titled The Fiqh of love, explores how everyday Muslims interpret Islamic family law, and then the ways in which American Muslims apply these legal traditions to various aspects of their lives, such as marriage and divorce. She is currently conducting research among Muslims in the greater-Chicago area.  Recent awards include the 2010 TGS Summer Language Grant and the 2009 BCICS Summer Travel Grant.  Her advisor is Rüdiger Seesemann. 

Lynn Jencks is a doctoral candidate in the Theology and Religious Reflection concentration.  Her studies in modern Feminist, Liberation, and Postcolonial Christian Theology center on the question:  how do people enlist God's aid in their fight against social injustice?  Based on her conviction that those on the "underside" are most aware of the realities of global socio-economic oppression, her current research explores how theologians from the One-Third World, through living in committed solidarity with the multiply-oppressed peoples in the Two-Thirds World, can facilitate opportunities for these Two-Thirds world voices to break through the barriers of culture and privilege that have all but excluded them from the dominant discourse that shapes Christian theology.

Saralyn McKinnon-Crowley  is a doctoral student in Medieval Christianity.  She is interested in saints, with a special focus on female, married, or atypical holy people, and Biblical interpretation, especially regarding the Song of Songs.  A guiding issue in her research is how people striving to be holy deal with the problem of living rightly in an imperfect world.

Katelyn Mesler is a doctoral candidate in Medieval Studies, with particular interests in Jewish-Christian relations, magic and witchcraft, medicine, prayer, angelology, and heresy. She has published on the history of prophetic thought, and she is currently writing her dissertation on the shared magical culture of Christians and Jews in Spain, Provence, and Italy.

Joseph D. Moser Jr. (Jody) completed a Master's degree from Harvard with a focus in ethics before coming to Northwestern. An ethicist  with roots in religion and philosopy,  his research interests include alterity, violence, responsibility, and limit cases in phenomenology. His current research focuses upon the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide in an effort to bring certain resources of contemporary French phenomenology to discussions and processes of justice and reconciliation in the wake of violence. Joseph received a Fulbright grant in 2010 to conduct his dissertation research – constructing a phenomenological theory of pardon – in Rwanda.  A member of the Northwestern Curling Club, Moser is also a two-time National Champion in US College Curling.

Victoria N.J. Prussing is a doctoral candidate in Medieval Christianity. Her research intestes center on the Middle Ages, with special interest in mysticism, gender, monasticism, heathcare, and religion in everyday life. Her dissertation explores the significance of illness in medieval monastic culture, with a focus on late medieval German nuns.  Recent awards include the Fulbright Graduate Fellowship 2008-2009 (Germany), and the DAAD Scholarship 2008-2009 (declin ed). Her advisor is Richard Kieckhefer.

Michal Raucher is a doctoral candidate in Religion, Ethics and Public Life.  She also works in Gender Studies, Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and Bioethics.  Her broader goal is to argue that a person's ethics are the result of his/her daily negotiation and reconciliation of multifaceted and intimate relationships that exist in constant tension.  Michal contends that individulas construct ethics for themselves within overwhelming cultural moral frameworks, and her research contributes to an understanding of the multifaceted relationship between religious and medical authorities.  Michal's dissertation with provide an analysis of the triangular relationship of religion, medicine and the individual in Israeli society.  Using date from a two-year ethnographic study of reproductive ethics in the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community in Jerusalem, she argues that although the medical and religious authorities attempt to control the reproductive lives of Haredi women, the women construct an ethical system based on their embodied knowledge.  Foundation for Jewish Culture Doctoral Scholarship, the 2009-2010 Fulbright Fellowship, and 2009 American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Early Career Support Grant.  Her advisors are Laurie Zoloth, Cristina Traina, and Helen Schwartzman.

Matthew Robinson is a doctoral student in the Theology and Religious Reflection track. He has research interests in: early Modern philosophy and theology, German Romanticism and Idealism, and the relevance of these for contemporary issues concerning globality, intersubjectivity and religious community. In particular, he is interested in the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the arc of theology that runs from Schleiermacher to Ernst Troeltsch. Recent awards include: Columbia Council for European Studies Pre-Dissertation Fellowship (2011), DAAD University Summer Course Grant (2010), TGS Summer Language Grant (2010). His advisor is Christine Helmer.

Ariel Schwartz is a doctoral student in the Contemporary Religions track. She is interested in the phenomenological experience of violence in sacred spaces, specifically in the Indian subcontinent. Her current research explores notions of “religious” spaces and the impact of these spaces on the vulnerable body. Using a combination of historical and ethnographic research, and a philosophical lens, she seeks to better understand how individual and communal bodies confront, contend with, and respond to violence on or around sacred sites.

Diego Soto is a doctoral student in Religion, Ethics and Public Life. He is interested in describing and analyzing the ways in which religious practices and ideas continue to influence the “secular” culture of sexuality in Costa Rica (his home country). He was awarded with the Fulbright LASPAU scholarship. Recently the National University of Costa Rica published his book Demanda Erotica. Religion terminable e interminable; it is a study on how Latin American Theologians of Liberation have read Freud’s ideas on religion. His advisor is Cristina Traina.

Jennifer L. Sta.Ana is a doctoral student in the Religious, Ethics, and Public Life track.  She is interested in how religious environments shape bioethical perspectives in the developing world.  She hopes to investigate how these perspectives have challenged the appropriation of scientific advancements that have the potential to alleviate third world concerns.  She will focus her research on the Catholic influence on reproductive technologies and public policy in the Philippines. Her advisors are Laurie Zoloth and Cristina Traina.

Abdoulaye Sounaye is a doctoral candidate in the Religion, Ethics and Public Life track. His secondary department is Anthropology. He is working on Islam in the public sphere in contemporary Niger.

Alex Thurston is a doctoral candidate in the Islam in Africa track. He is interested in interactions between West Africa and the Arab world, and is also interested in ways that Sufi and anti-Sufi Muslim movements in countries like Nigeria and Senegal participate in public life.

Stephanie Wolfe is a doctoral candidate in American Religion.  Her dissertation is a historically-informed ethnography of an evangelical Christian organization that brings young adults to live and volunteer in predominantly African American and Latino urban neighborhoods.  Her research interests include American evangelicalism, the sociology of religion, urban religion, and the intersection of religion with race, politics and economics.  Her advisor is Robert Orsi. .