POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH SCholars
A.Y. 2025-present
Jamie Marsella
Jamie Marsella is a historian of medicine and a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Her current project examines the role of domestic science, religion, and eugenics in Progressive Era public health and child welfare. Work stemming from her research has been published in academic and public-facing publications, including the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Teen Vogue, Nursing Clio, and The American Historian. Jamie holds a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University and an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago. Her research has been supported by fellowships from various institutions, including the New York Academy of Medicine, the American Philosophical Society, the Charles Warren Center for American Studies, the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine.
A.Y. 2023-2025
Raffaella Taylor-Seymour is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University. Her work uses ethnographic and archival methods to examine how colonialism violently upended and reshaped understandings of religion, gender, sexuality, and the environment in Zimbabwe. Raffaella’s research investigates how colonial states deployed ideas about religion to remake bodies, relations, and landscapes, and how people contest these legacies in the present. She is completing a book manuscript titled Ancestral Intimacies: Queerness, Relations, and Religion in Zimbabwe.
A.Y. 2019-2022
Mohamad Amer Meziane is a philosopher whose current research projects and teaching activities involve IRCPL, the Department of Religion, and the Institute for African Studies. He is also a research associate at the Sorbonne Institute for Law and Philosophy (ISJPS) and a member of the governing board of the CNRS based Research Network ICC (Islam et chercheurs dans la Cité), where he holds a seminar series on secularism and public religion. His new research project analyzes the ways in which these imperial transformations are challenged within African spaces. The project questions the boundaries of Africa and the Middle East through the religious, racializing and ecological effects of political geographies. The aim of this project is to try and unfold the contemporary stakes of a systematic critique of these geographies for African theory, from Fanon until today. As of Fall 2023, he is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University.
Visiting scholars
A.Y. 2022-2023
Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His writings cover a range of topics in social and cultural theory, the philosophical foundations of social thought and the human sciences, and the ethnography and history of Southeast Asia. In particular, he is interested in religion and ethics; semiotics and language; material culture; gifts, commodities, and money; and media. At present his research centers on two topics. The first concerns the ethical dimensions of political conflict, the second, the relations among ethical, religious, and economic systems of value. During his time at the Institute (spring, 2023), he will be working on a book on ethics and meeting with some the Institute’s past and current student fellows.
A.Y. 2021-2022
Neena Mahadev is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College. She has conducted fieldwork in Sri Lanka, and also in Singapore, with a focus on the theo-political interplay between Theravāda (Pāli) Buddhism, Pentecostal Christianity, and Roman Catholicism, and the innovations that arise within agonistic religious milieus. Her work appears in Current Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, Religion and Society, HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Religion, and Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. Currently, she serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Global Buddhism and is on the Series Board for New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity (Bloomsbury). Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute. Dr. Mahadev is finalizing her first book manuscript, Of Karma and Grace: Mediating Religious Difference in Millennial Sri Lanka, for the series on Religion, Culture, and Public Life with Columbia University Press. The manuscript was awarded the 2021 Claremont Prize in Religion from IRCPL.
Lucinda Ramberg is an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. Her research projects in South India have focused on the body as an artifact of culture and power in relation to questions of caste, sexuality, religiosity, and projects of social transformation. Her first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded several prizes. Her current book project, We Were Always Buddhist: Dalit Conversion and Sexual Modernity, investigates the sexual politics of lived Buddhism through an ethnography of religious conversion in contemporary South India. The research and writing of this book has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and the American Council for Learned Societies/Robert H. Ho Family Foundation for Buddhist Studies.
Angelantonio Grossi is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He is an anthropologist whose work reflects on questions of translation, coloniality, and religious conversion in the engagement between African spiritualists and digital infrastructures in an often-presumed Christian landscape. In his research, he interrogates common delineations of ethnic, linguistic, and geographical boundaries by foregrounding the role of Ghana-based spirit mediums in the mediatization and revaluation of traditions like Vodu across multi-continental geographies, including Afro-diasporic temporalities and experiences of blackness. At the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life he is completing his dissertation entitled Spirits in Circulation: Digital Media and Indigenous Spirituality in Post-Christian Ghana.