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.
Carlos Batista is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Columbia University. His research examines how archaeological and environmental preservation in the Yucatán Peninsula constitute a togetherness that expresses ethical and religious orientations. Looking at left-wing populism’s efforts to transform a landscape, and at Mayan forms of commonality that express themselves around the nineteenth-century cult of the Speaking Cross, Batista’s project proposes that past ideals of the public, the common, the good, and the just are imbricated into the present fight against left-wing developmentalism. Examining the exploration of the two largest underwater caves in the world and efforts to stop the expropriation of communal lands, this research asks how political ideals and religious orientations move through two classical elements—land and water.
Nathan Blackwell is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. His research is centered in Native American and Indigenous Studies and focuses on the future of Indigenous political philosophy. His dissertation examines Diné/Navajo political ideas of war and kinship through a future-oriented framework in order to articulate alternative understandings of those terms and their potential usefulness for contemporary Indigenous struggles. The project engages in an analysis of Diné metaphysics and Ancestral political practices, situated in the future, to explore how understandings and practices of war, politics, and kinship might be (re)shaped and (re)oriented to apprehend true decolonized Indigenous futures. The IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship will allow him to conduct archival research on the Navajo Nation and in New Mexico this summer.
Nat Chang-Deutsch is a rising junior in the joint program between Columbia University, where he is majoring in Linguistics, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he studies Jewish History. His project engages with memory, gender, denominationalism, and the different meanings of tradition within American Jewish life. This is done through the prism of the Traditional Synagogue Movement, a short-lived Jewish movement founded in 1949. The movement consisted of Orthodox synagogues that had previously adopted innovations such as mixed gender seating. As American Orthodoxy centralized in the post-war period, these synagogues were sidelined from the movement, eventually attempting to form their own collective.
Nathan Cho (he/him) is a rising senior at Columbia College majoring in English and Creative Writing. He is interested in the field of Asian-American literature and how it reflects the constant formation and deformation of the Asian-American identity. His research this summer will focus on how the imagery of Buddhism acts as a means for identity formation in Cambodian-American literature.
Hazem Fahmy is a PhD candidate in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies where he is working towards a dissertation on epic cinema, desert landscapes, and the production of space. The IRCPL summer fellowship will support a research trip to Cairo where he will be looking at under-examined periodical and production materials related to the brief mid-century boom in Egyptian Islamic epic cinema. This genre, barely examined in either English or Arabic-language scholarship, challenges long-held conceptions in Film Studies regarding the relationship between religious epics, nationalism, and the Cold War.
Lucia Galaretto is a Doctoral Candidate in Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines the relationship between Spanish enlightened reforms and the arts in South America during the late eighteenth century. The IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship will support her research on the secularized notions of artistic, economic, and legal value that developed with the disentailment of Jesuit assets in the region after 1767.
Claudia Grigg Edo is a PhD student in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She works at the intersection of critical theory, literary studies, and histories of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. Her dissertation, “Transference as Transformation from Fanon to Chatbots,” studies attempts to politicize transference beyond the psychoanalytic dyad. The IRCPL Fellowship will support her research on the difficulties faced by Frantz Fanon when he attempted to import “social therapy” methods that he had learned in France to Blida-Joinville hospital in Algeria. This new religious, cultural, and colonial context demanded a transformation of theory and practice.
Asa Hadley is a rising senior majoring in modern intellectual history at Columbia College. This summer, he will undertake a research project examining how Christian authorities and communities have interpreted visionary and hallucinatory experiences across historical periods. Moving from early modern mysticism through twentieth-century psychedelic research to contemporary artificial intelligence, his work will trace how subjective encounters with the divine are classified and transformed into religious doctrine. By distinguishing between unprompted religious visions, drug-induced experiences, and AI-generated “hallucinations,” the project seeks to illuminate how shifting epistemic frameworks reshape what counts as authentic revelation in Christian thought.
Dr. Theresa Kadish is an MA candidate in Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Gershon Kekst Graduate School. She received her PhD in Biology from Binghamton University, and specializes in translating complex academic insights into accessible digital narratives. Her summer research project, entitled "How the Baal Cycle became the Book of Exodus: An evolutionary approach to comparative mythology," investigates how ancient Israelite religion and literature evolved out of its Canaanite antecedents. During the fellowship, she will produce two high-production video essays that integrate technical translations of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle into sharable films. These videos will provide compelling comparisons between the relatively unknown Baal myth, and the Book of Exodus, which borrowed from it. Working at the intersection of cultural evolutionary theory and theology, Theresa seeks to bridge the gap between academic archeological discoveries and the spiritual needs of contemporary Jewish congregational audiences.
Saila Sri Kambhatla is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Saila's dissertation project examines the ecological basis of religious histories and practices amongst a Jālāri fishing community in South India that predominantly worships village-goddesses or Grāmadevatālu. The research inquires into the historical shaping of ritual practice and community mobilization amongst the lower-caste fishing group through a focus on the sea-goddess that is believed to be guarding the Jālāris against ecological crises of disasters and oceanic losses. The historical ethnographic project adopts a critical inquiry into the systemic forces of caste inequality and institutional developmentalism that actuate religious (re)constructions and practices.The IRCPL Summer Graduate Fellowship will support the study of the history of littoral disasters, ecological transformations and climate change as etched in cultural memory, and registered in institutional records.
Rashad Ullah Khan is a first-year Master's student in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. He is interested in religious nationalism, sovereignty, spatial practice, majoritarian politics, postcolonial statehood and minority belonging with a focus on Hindutva vigilantism and communal violence in contemporary India. With the support of the IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, he will analyze how Hindutva vigilante organizations operating in Dehradun (state of Uttarakhand) understand and narrate the legitimacy of their own violence across religious, civic, and political spheres. The project will examine both the day-to-day operations of Hindutva vigilante organizations and the larger ideological doctrine of sacred duty and civic belonging as concepts, as well as the political and sovereign orders they authorize.
Arju Khatun (she/her) is a second-year PhD student in the Department of Religion. Her research focuses on colonial South Asian subcontinent and postcolonial India, with particular attention to the formation of the Bengali Muslim community. Her current project examines the concept of the “interreligious” in Hindu–Muslim contexts, building on her earlier work on Bengali Muslim identity in 1980s West Bengal, secularism, and Bengali Islam. Working primarily in Bangla, alongside Hindi and Urdu, she approaches the interreligious through close textual analysis of historical romances and their reception in periodicals. Her research also engages legal codes and newspaper reports on Hindu–Muslim relationships, with a focus on the gendered dimensions of these representations. The IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship will support archival research in West Bengal, India, enabling her to collect lesser-known materials by and on Bengali Muslims, particularly in relation to the conceptualization of the interreligious.
Elaheh Khazi is a rising senior at Columbia College, majoring in History and MESAAS and minoring in Religion. Her research interests are broadly centered on the Middle East, Islam, the Persianate world, and Afghanistan. As a Laidlaw, Mellon Mays, and International Affairs - CC Summer Research Fellow at Columbia University, she has done extensive research into the Afghan American community and the history of emigration out of Afghanistan since the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s and immigration of Afghans to the US since then. Through the IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship, she intends to look deeper into the religious traditions of the Afghan and Afghan American communities. By looking at the deep history of these traditions and how they are continuously embodied even in the Afghan diaspora, she hopes to not only present the background of these religious traditions, which are much older than modern narratives of geopolitics and the weaponization of religion in the context of Afghanistan, but also bring the Afghan American story into academia, which is the goal of her larger project “Reclaiming Our Narrative.”
Janina S. Santer is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Columbia University, where she focuses on the modern Middle East. Her dissertation research explores social politics in Lebanon and Syria from the early twentieth century through the 1950s, with an emphasis on conceptions of welfare and the state. Before moving to New York, she earned an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the American University of Beirut, where her graduate work received the Salim Ali Salam Award. She also holds a BA in Political Science from the Universität Hamburg. Her work has been published in the Journal of Tourism History and the Arabic-language intellectual and cultural quarterly Bidayat.
Talia Grogan Schmidt is a rising senior at Barnard College, majoring in Art History. Her studies focus on the material conditions of artworks and how artists harness the expressive potentials of the oil medium in early modern European paintings. With the IRCPL Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship, she will travel to Madrid and Toledo to examine the religious oeuvre of the Renaissance painter El Greco. She will particularly consider how this artist manifested the unique Neoplatonic thought of 16th-century Spain in his handling of paint on the canvas, by considering his altarpieces in situ and by analyzing the rich marginalia in his library of religious and artistic theoretical texts.
Sidi Wang is a rising senior majoring in Religion, whose work centers on the intersection of modern Chinese Buddhism and disability studies, particularly on how the transformation of monastic institutions under conditions of modernity impacted disabled monastic members. Her thesis examines how Republican-era Buddhist reformers redefined the boundaries of the religious community through emerging discourses of health and social utility. With the support of the IRCPL summer fellowship, she will travel to China and Taiwan to conduct archival research in monastic institutions. There, she will examine institutional records and monastic regulations to trace how modern Buddhist communities negotiated the pressures of scientific nationalism and imported epistemological framework. Her project seeks to illuminate how modern categories of fitness and capacity reshaped not only religious institutions but the very definition of religious life.
Ayelet Wenger is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Classical Studies Graduate Program. She studies Jewish texts composed in the Roman empire, and her dissertation collects and analyzes uses of Greek educational literature in rabbinic texts. She will spend the summer consulting manuscript images and other resources in Jerusalem.
Maya Wilson-Sánchez is a PhD candidate in the Art History and Archaeology department and studies how ancient art in the Americas shapes contemporary artistic practice and local artisan economies. They are interested in methods of Indigenous archeology and community-based projects that empower descendants to be active participants in shaping their own histories. As part of their doctoral research, Wilson-Sánchez explores how contemporary replicas of pre-colonial ceramics are used in spiritual rituals in the Andes, much as their originals were. This illustrates that the lineage of a contemporary replica extends beyond the art world and the tourist market, contributing to continuity not just of art but also of ancestral spirituality.
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.
See here for previous Dissertation fellows >
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.
For previous Public Outreach fellows see here