Public Outreach Fellows
The Public Outreach fellowship is a new program started by IRCPL as a part of the “Religion and Climate Change” initiative. Fellows are expected to develop a discrete body of programming or related activities that contribute to and expand upon the intellectual life and public outreach of the Institute. The Public Outreach fellowship awards $10,000 to advanced PhD students and a dedicated budget for the proposed outreach activities.
Dakota Kirkendall Straub is a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology department at Columbia University. She is interested in the ways that Western elites make stories about and interact with nonhuman worlds, especially during a time of ecological crisis, through science, communication technologies, and governance. Her dissertation research concerns wealthy individuals who fund and conduct private ocean exploration projects and how they understand their role in the field of marine science. Before beginning graduate studies, she worked for a wildlife conservation organization in Rwanda. She has a BA in English and Creative Writing from Barnard College and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.
Angelica Modabber Sobhandost is a doctoral candidate in the Italian and Comparative Literature departments at Columbia University. Her dissertation explores how the representation of the natural environment is shaped and produced by religious convictions; she focuses on architectural history and the history of science in the 17th century. As a Public Outreach fellow, she hopes to create conversations surrounding the environmental consequences of colonialism in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahara.
SUMMER RESEARCH FELLOWS
The IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship is awarded each Spring to assist graduate and undergraduate students with expenses directly related to research, including travel, lodging, and materials during the Summer semester.
Sebastian Bader is a rising senior majoring in religion and minoring in film at Columbia College. He is an aspiring screenwriter fascinated by the intersection of modernity and mysticism. This summer he will be writing a film focused on the rise and fall of the Guggenheim's tempestuous first director Hilla Rebay and her various attempts to invent her own brand of heaven in her fledgling museum.
Eyshe Beirich (he/him) is a PhD student in the Department of Germanic Languages at Columbia University. His research focuses on modern and early modern Yiddish and German literature, with specific interests in the literature of violence and difference, translation, and multilingualism. The IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship will fund a research trip to Oxford where he will transcribe and analyze Yiddish songs of lament, an occluded poetic tradition of Yiddish-speaking Jews from the 16th to the 18th centuries. These songs, rare vernacular addresses to God that tell stories of anti-Jewish violence and the instability of Jewish existence, represent an outstanding example of premodern Yiddish creativity and help us understand Ashkenazi Jewish relationships not only to vernacular religious practice, but also secular literature and the history of antisemitism.
Mehreen Zahra Jiwan (Zahra) is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Columbia University’s Department of Religion. She completed her undergraduate and Master’s degrees at the University of Toronto, where she developed her interest in approaches to early Shīʿism that foreground sensory and material culture studies. Zahra’s dissertation project is currently titled A Land of Letters: Affirming the Imamate in Sāmarrāʾ and Baghdād. It explores the intersecting phenomena of epistolography and the (re)configuration of sacred geography as central to a shifting praxis of mediating Imamic authority between the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries. At the same time, she examines otherwise neglected sources such as early pilgrimage manuals, hadith collections, under-studied mosques, and gravesites central to Shīʿī memory in Baghdad and Samarrāʾ, in order to make audible the early-Imāmī voice - one among the many voices that animate these two cities.
Joanna Suwen Lee-Brown is a 7th-year PhD candidate in the Modern Chinese Literature track of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and an affiliate of the Institute of Comparative Literature and Society. Her dissertation explores the shifting relationship between global Islam, socialism, and Third World internationalism in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from the 1950s to the present. It asks if religion is compatible with global emancipatory left-wing politics by tracing Chinese Muslims’ historical attempts to theorize and narrativize the relationship between Islam, anti-imperialism, and socialism through translingual writing and media practices. With the support of the IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, she will travel to the Northwest of China to locate rare textual materials through informal networks.
Khadeeja Majoka is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the department of Religion. Her work explores divine madness, antinomian mysticism, and multi-confessional subaltern religion in Pakistan. Combining ethnographic and textual approaches she studies contemporary iterations of the tradition of wandering faqirs - antinomian ascetics who become “dead” to the social world upon being called by living or dead saints. Rejecting the social order and its futurities, these people perform embodied critiques of it through transgressive practices. Their path, and the reverence they inspire, is intertwined with the faqir as a centuries-old exalted trope in Indo-Persian poetry. This project focuses on how normative orders of governance, gender, kinship, and religious and interpersonal ethics are refused, argued, and reimagined within the larger, fluid subaltern religious space gathered around the faqir. The IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship will allow her to study the poetic traditions of a faqir community in South Punjab.
Juan Camilo Rojas Gomez is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. His research explores the late-medieval and early-modern Iberian world - spanning the Iberian Peninsula, the Americas, and East Asia - with a strong focus on religious, intellectual, and art history. His dissertation reconsiders the early modern Iberian presence in East and Southeast Asia by foregrounding the role of Catholic religious orders in shaping trans-Pacific exchange. The project focuses on religious artifacts as material agents of evangelization across Asia and the Americas - objects through which missionaries asserted Catholic doctrine, engaged with local belief systems, and constructed intellectual frameworks for understanding non-European societies. By centering these objects within broader networks of circulation, the study aims to demonstrate how religious orders sustained transoceanic connections that profoundly influenced Iberian conceptions of Asia and extended the reach of Catholicism well beyond the domain of commerce.
Yara Saqfalhait is a seventh-year doctoral candidate in Architectural History at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines the rise of proceduralism in architectural production in the late Ottoman empire, which unfolded as an unprecedented preoccupation with organizing construction processes according to predetermined rules. The IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship will support her research on the building operations of the Ministry of Pious Endowments (Waqfs) in Istanbul at the turn of the twentieth century.
Elizaveta Sheremet is a second-year PhD student in the Sociology Department at Columbia University. Her research sits at the intersection of the sociology of science, folk science, and the sociology of morality. She is currently studying when and how moral reasoning emerges among scientists, how it is expressed, and what factors shape or reinforce it. Her summer project examines the relationship between discourses of public trust in science and the moralization of scientific practice, using text analysis and survey experiments.
Maddox Weckerle-Dietz is a third-year student at Columbia College studying Philosophy and Psychology. Her research project, Beyond Disenchantment: Enchanted Foundations of the Modern Political Sphere, argues that enchantment - long associated with religion - now operates through secular political institutions. By analyzing political mythology, charismatic political leadership, and the symbolism of governmental architecture, she investigates how the sacred continues to structure the modern political sphere. Through the IRCPL Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship, Maddox will conduct field research in Washington, D.C.
Finn Witham is a rising junior at Columbia College majoring in English and Philosophy. He is interested in the history and development of alchemy, especially its philosophical foundations and their impact on the later Scientific Revolution. His summer research will examine how late Medieval and Early Modern English literature interpreted, critiqued, and satirized alchemy. By exploring the various moral and social evaluations of the practice, he aims to highlight a core tension between alchemy’s foundational axioms and its cultural impact - a tension that bears contemporary relevance amid ethical and social discourse over ongoing technological advancements.
Melanie Yiyin Zhang is a rising senior majoring in Religion with a focus on Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Her research studies how Buddhist thinkers have approached leadership, moral decision-making, and social action in times of political uncertainty. This project is a combined historical and philosophical study of Buddhist ethical frameworks, especially the tension between silence and action during crises. This summer, Melanie will conduct archival research on Tibetan Buddhist monastic communities under Manchu rulership to study Buddhist approaches to public engagement.
Rebecca Zola is a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. Her dissertation explores how the Israeli jazz scene is a space where ethno-national identity and artistic hybridity intersect, reflecting shifting socio-political realities and cultural transformations. Rebecca's research interests include jazz and popular music, gender, and Israeli and Jewish studies. Her original research has been published in academic journals and books. She received an M.A. degree in musicology from Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and B.A. and B.F.A. degrees in jazz performance and writing from The New School in NYC.
See here for previous Summer research fellows >
Dissertation FELLOWS
The IRCPL Dissertation Fellowship program grants $5000 awards to advanced PhD students. Fellows are expected to meet monthly with the director of IRCPL to present their research and to workshop chapters of their dissertation.
Amy Barenboim is a 6th year PhD candidate in the English & Comparative Literature department at Columbia University. Her dissertation project, "Shadow Internationalisms: African Diasporic Literature and the 'Jewish Question,'" concerns Black literary responses to European antisemitism in Germany and Russia, and how the latter informed Black internationalist writing about colonialism and slavery. It further explores how the fallout of European antisemitism—the establishment of a Jewish State—exposed fault lines in Black understandings of nationalism and internationalism. The project demonstrates that the figure of global Jewry was central in cultivating Black conceptions of, in Alain Locke's words, "the race question as a world problem," thus arguing for a global framework within Afro-Jewish studies, a field which has predominantly been focused on the U.S.
Sunmin Cha is a PhD candidate in the Art History and Archaeology Department. Her dissertation, Bulging Veins and Swollen Eyes: The Netherlandish Images of the Man of Sorrows in the Age of Reformation, examines how early modern artists in Haarlem—including Maarten van Heemskerck, Cornelis van Haarlem, and Hendrick Goltzius—reimagined the traditional Man of Sorrows imagery during the turbulent decades of the Protestant Reformation and the Dutch Revolt. Moving beyond earlier interpretations that frame these images in devotional contexts, the dissertation explores how visual representations of Christ’s suffering served as tools of personal consolation and communal restoration in a time of theological and political upheaval and artistic negotiation.
Paola Cossermelli Messina is a PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at Columbia University's Department of Music. She is currently completing a dissertation on the intersection of music and migration through materials of her family archive and the narratives of three primary interlocutors: a Muslim Palestinian-Brazilian rapper in Rio de Janeiro; a first-generation Lebanese-Brazilian recording artist who began singing in a Presbyterian choir; and a Muslim Palestinian vocalist who sought asylum in Brazil. These stories and materials provide a unique opportunity for a comparative musical study and ethnography that examines how the dynamics of religious identity play out alongside questions of nationalism and ethnicity. This approach contributes to a deeper understanding of the history of Arab music in diaspora and the shifting complexities of migration and belonging.
Doha Tazi Hemida is PhD candidate in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies (MESAAS) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines the relation between occasionalism (the doctrine according to which God directly causes, and continuously sustains, the phenomena of nature, as opposed to guiding them indirectly through intermediate laws) and theories of sovereignty. She traces the history of this relation in the work of Muslim theologians and jurists from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, with a focus on Bāqillānī and Ibn Taymiyya, uncovering the logic by which the divine attribute of ownership/sovereignty (milk/mulk) serves to bind together the discourses of natural and political philosophy.
Lelia Stadler is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Her dissertation is a social and legal history of Jewish immigrants’ encounters with the Argentine state, examining how the legal prohibition on divorce shaped the Jewish family, community, and citizens in Argentina between c. 1880 and 1960. Her previous research has appeared in Migrants, Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Latin America (edited by Raanan Rein, Stefan Rinke, and David Sheinin, 2020). Her new article, “Ethical and Legal Bigamy: Transatlantic Jewish Families Caught between Conflicting Legalities, Argentina, 1930–1939,” is forthcoming in Jewish Social Studies. During the fellowship, Lelia will be developing and presenting a dissertation chapter that examines how a Jewish organization facilitated informal Jewish divorces in 1930s–40s Argentina, using religious law to navigate—and at times subvert—the constraints of the state’s restrictive civil divorce regime.