Joint Projects (2026-2027)
Age, Women, and Religious Personhood
Principal Investigators: Valentina Izmirlieva, Professor of Slavic Languages and Director of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University; Aziza Shanazarova, Assistant Professor of Religion, Columbia University.
How does a woman's age shape her place in religious life? While scholars have paid considerable attention to gender and religion, they have rarely examined how women's religious roles, opportunities, and authority change as they grow older. This project explores how religious traditions distinguish between different stages of women's lives and how these transitions affect their participation in religious communities. Bringing together scholars working across religious traditions and historical periods, the project will examine how age intersects with marriage, motherhood, widowhood, and women's access to religious authority. A workshop at Columbia University in April 2027 will bring historians, anthropologists, and scholars of religion into conversation to explore these questions and develop new approaches to studying age, gender, and religious life.
Art and the Apocalypse
Principal Investigators: Susanna Berger (Department of Art and Archaeology, Columbia University); Christia Mercer (Department of Philosophy, Columbia University)
We have assembled an international group of experts to discuss how artists, philosophers, and theologians theorized and visualized the end of time in early modern periods. Papers will explore how the materiality and spatial arrangements of images reconfigure the Apocalypse to generate meanings in forms that the makers of these visual works believed yielded insights, far superior from those conveyed by earlier texts. A core concern is how clerical authors in Europe and the “new world” used the Apocalypse to frighten, cajole, or entice the European Christians and Indigenous people whom they hoped to convert to believe or behave in ways consistent with an expectation that the End was imminent. Our invited speakers include Columbia graduate students as well as an interdisciplinary group of faculty, from Columbia and beyond.
The Contemporary Rise of Religious “Maternity Homes”
Principal Investigators: Sarah Knuckey (Columbia Law School); Christine Ryan (Columbia Law School); Elizabeth Platt (Union Theological Seminary).
This project investigates the rapid post-Dobbs proliferation of faith-based "maternity homes", largely unregulated residential facilities for pregnant and postpartum people operated by anti-abortion Christian organizations across the United States. Often extensions of crisis pregnancy centers, these facilities have nearly tripled in number since Dobbs, yet remain largely unregulated and understudied. The research documents their geographic expansion, funding sources (public and private), and operational practices, including restrictions on movement, communication, and mandatory religious programming. The project also explores the evidence base for rights-respecting alternatives such as unconditional cash transfers and housing-first policies.