Specialty Areas

George D. Bond

• Theravada Buddhism
• Pali textual studies
• Buddhism in Sri Lanka
• Buddhism and Development in South Asia and Southeast Asia
• Meditation and Mindfulness

Christine Helmer

• Martin Luther's theology
• Friedrich Schleiermacher's theology and philosophy
• German intellectual history (16th-20th centuries)
• Biblical theology, systematic and constructive theology
• Liberal theologies
• Theology and religious studies
• Love
• Truth

Sarah Jacoby

• Indo-Tibetan Buddhist doctrine and ritual in practice
• Buddhist revelation (Tib. gter ma)
• Gender studies
• Tantric literature
• Auto/biography studies
• Eastern Tibetan area studies

Richard Kieckhefer

• Late medieval religious culture, with particular interest in ways of representing the presence of Christ in ordinary and extraordinary piety
• Church architecture
• History of witchcraft and magic

Michelle Molina

• History of Christianity in early modern Europe and Latin America, with emphasis on the Society of Jesus and colonial Mexico
• Early modern natural and moral philosophy
• Interested in the space where critical theory meets social science

Barbara Newman

• Medieval religious culture
• Allegorical poetry
• Women's spirituality
• Hagiography
• Monastic and mystical spirituality
• Medieval understandings of the self

Robert Orsi

• American Catholicism in both historical and ethnographic perspective
• Theory and method for the study of religion

Kenneth Seeskin

• Jewish Philosophy
• Ancient and Medieval Philosophy
• Philosophy of Religion

Sarah Taylor

• American Religion and Culture
• Religion and Ecology
• Gender Studies
• Green Religion
• Green Culture
• Women and Religion in America
• Religion and Popular Culture
• Theories of Religion and Culture

Cristina Traina

• Religious ethics with an emphasis on Roman Catholic and feminist thought and interdisciplinary method
• Childhood
• The ethics of touch in relations between unequals
• Sexuality and reproduction
• Ecology
• Justice issues in bioethics
• Economic and immigration justice
• Method

Sani Umar

• Islam and Colonialism in West Africa
• Islamic Law
• Sufism-Anti-Sufism in West Africa
• Contemporary Islamic Thought and Liberalism
• Islamic Intellectual Traditions of West Africa
• Theory and Methodology of Academic Study of Religion

Barry Wimpfheimer

• Classical Rabbinic Literature
• Babylonian Talmud
• The relationship between law and literature as both a general theoretical question and within the Jewish tradition

Brook Ziporyn

• Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism
• Metaphysical, axiological and epistemological developments in Chinese thought and religion
• Comparative philosophical issues emerging from the encounter between Indo-European and Sinitic thinking as evidenced in Chinese Buddhism, especially Tiantai, and the implications of this encounter for contemporary thought
• The concept of Li (principle, coherence) in Chinese thought from the classical period to the early Song Dynasty

Laurie Zoloth

• Bioethics
• Emerging issues in medical and research genetics, nanotechnology, neuroscience
• Ethical issues in stem cell research
• Distributive justice in health care