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Current Students

Amanda Baugh is a doctoral student in American Religion. She is interested in religious environmentalism and gender, and she uses ethnographic and historical methods.

Shuman Chen is a doctoral student 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.

Brian Clites is a doctoral student in American Religions. Through comparative research, he focuses on the interactions between Protestant and non-Protestant groups in the United States. Thus far, he has focused on Mormonism, Pentecostalism, Christian Science, and numerous smaller religious movements. He also studies the relationships between scholars and these groups, with the goal of advancing our understanding of broader trends.

Matthew John Cressler is a doctoral student in American Religion. He is primarily interested in the historical study of religion in the United States as it intersects with conceptions of race and national identity, particularly in the context of American Catholic and African American religious communities.

Vanessa Crosby is a doctoral student 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 student 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. Her areas of interest are American Catholicism and women in religion. She hopes to use historical and ethnographic methods in her work.

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 Glaholt is from Toronto, Ontario, and completed a Master's degree at Tufts University in Animals and Public Policy. She studies religion, ethics, and public life at Northwestern, focusing specifically on animal and environmental ethics. She is the Co-Chair of the Religion, Ecology, and Culture Section of the Midwest American Academy of Religion, and will be teaching an upcoming course on "Religion and Animals" through Northwestern's Department of Religion.

Tina Howe is a doctoral student in the Religion, Ethics, and Public Life track with broad interests in contemporary Islam and North Africa. Her research focuses on Islamic education, nationalism, political Islam, and gender. She is also a member of the African Studies seminar, an interdisciplinary group of graduate students working on Africa.

Lynn Jencks is a doctoral student in the Medieval Christianity concentration. She earned her MA in Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH, where her Masters Thesis explored the manner in which the interests of the wealthy pervade the stained glass of Medieval English parish churches. Her current research interests include the religious life of medieval women, mysticism, and religious dissent. 

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 in 2006. A doctoral student in the Religion, Ethics and Public Life track, he studies religion, genocide, alterity, and the unforgivable. His 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.

Michael Nichols entered the program in 2005, working jointly in Religion and Anthropology. Religions of South Asia is his focus, particularly intertextuality of narratives between Post-Asokan Indian Buddhism and Brahmanical/Classical Hindu traditions. A large degree of his research deals with symbols of evil and monstrosity. He works with George Bond (Religion) and Robert Launay (Anthropology).

Victoria N.J. Prussing is a doctoral candidate in Medieval Christianity. Her dissertation will draw from religious texts and archival documents to explore the experience of illness in late medieval German convents (c. 1250-1500).

Michal Raucher completed a Masters degree in Bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a doctoral candidate in the Religion, Ethics and Public Life track, while her secondary department is Anthropology. Michal is interested in Judaism, bioethics, gender, reproduction, and Israel studies. She received a Fulbright grant to conduct her dissertation research in Israel on the pregnancy ethics of Orthodox Jewish women living in Jerusalem. 

Matthew Robinson studies Christian theology in the Theology and Religious Reflection track.  He has wide-ranging interests in: world Christianity, Christianity in Africa, and Pentecostalisms, as well as German Idealism, Pragmatism and Phenomenology.  He is currently working on using ethnographic methodologies to do constructive theology in Kenya.

Tobin Shearer completed his degree in History and Religion in June 2008. His research interests include religious communities as sites of civil rights movement activity, children's influence on religious notions of innocence, and the African-American church. He is an Assistant Professor of African-American History at the University of Montana and the coordinator of the African-American Studies Program there.

Abdoulaye Sounaye is a doctoral student 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 student 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.

Lora Walsh is writing her dissertation on the church as a female character in late medieval and early modern England. She specializes in medieval Christianity and gender.

Stephanie Wolfe is a doctoral student in American Religion, interested in using historical and ethnographic methods to study protestantism in the United States. She is particularly interested in changing contemporary evangelical attitudes toward social, political and cultural issues.