People

Adam Becker
Assistant Professor
Major Interests: Jewish-Christian relations in Late Antiquity; critical theories of religion; Syriac language and literature; reception of classical antiquity; religion in the modern Middle East.
 

                
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                Ann Pellegrini
Associate Professor; Acting Director, Religious Studies Program (Spring 2008)
Major Interests: Queer theory; religion and sexuality; psychoanalysis and culture; religion, performance, and community formation; cultures of childhood; feminist and queer performance; confessional culture; religion and secularism; Jewish cultural studies.
 
Francis E. Peters
Professor
Major Interests: Islamic history and religion; comparative Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
 

                
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                Angela Zito
Associate Professor; Director, Program in Religious Studies
Major Interests: Cultural history/historical anthropology; critical theories of religion; religions of China; religion and media; history and anthropology of embodiment; performance and subjectivity.
 

Affiliated Faculty


Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak
Professor
Major Interests: Medieval history; France; prescholastic culture and society; sign theory; sigillography, diplomatics, and paleography.
 
Barbara Browning
Associate Professor
Major Interests: Brazil and the African diaspora; dance ethnography; race, gender and postcoloniality; spirit possession and healing.
 
Mary J Carruthers
Professor
Major Interests: Medieval literature and rhetoric; memory and mnemonic technique; the history of spirituality
 
Peter J Chelkowski
Professor
Major Interests: literature, mysticism, Islamic studies and performing arts of the Middle East.
 
Hasia R. Diner
Professor
Major Interests: American Jewish history, American immigration history and women's history.
 
Daniel E. Fleming
Professor
Major Interests: Assyriology, Hebrew Bible interpretation and cultural history, ancient Syria, Emar, ancient religion, interplay of ancient Near Eastern societies.
 
Katherine Fleming
Professor
Major Interests: Modern Greek history; Balkans; late Ottoman history; nationalism; religion.
 
Michael Gilsenan
Professor; Chair of Middle Eastern Studies
Major Interests: Anthropology and sociology of Islam; history and anthropology, narrative theory; anthropology of power and violence; urban studies; cultural representation.
 
Faye Ginsburg
Professor; Director, Graduate Program in Culture and Media; Director, Center for Media, Culture & History; Co-Director, Center for Religion and Media
Major Interests: Social anthropology; ethnographic film; indigenous media; social movements in the United States; gender and reproduction.
 
Ogden Goelet
Clinical Professor
Major Interests: Religion and history of ancient Egyptian culture.
 
Fiona Griffiths
Assistant Professor
Major Interests: Monasticism; Medieval libraries and book production; the Twelfth-Century Renaissance; Friendship; Heloise and Abelard.
 
Bernard Haykel
Associate Professor
Major Interests: Islamic law; Islamic political movements; history of Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
 
Richard Hull
Professor
Major Interests: Democratization in Africa; origins of segregation in South Africa.
 
Penelope Johnson
Professor
Major Interests: Women's history; medieval history; monastic history.
 
Deborah Kapchan
Professor
Major Interests: Narrative, poetics, feminist theory, music, aesthetics, North Africa and the Middle East.
 
Marion Holmes Katz
Associate Professor
Major Interests: Ritual purity; Islam.
 
Aisha Khan
Associate Professor; Director of Undergraduate Studies
Major Interests: Race and ethnicity; social stratification; theory and method in diaspora studies; religion; the Caribbean and Latin America.
 
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
Professor
Major Interests: Jewish cultural performance, aesthetics of everyday life, tourism, museums, and heritage.
 
Kenneth Krabbenhoft
Professor
Major Interests: Early-modern Spanish rhetoric and poetics (Góngora, Quevedo, Gracián); the Western mystical tradition, especially the Spanish 16th century and the kabbalah of the Spanish diaspora; Portuguese and Brazilian literature (Clarice Lispector, Sofia de Melo, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago); science-fiction; and translation.
 
Karen Kupperman
Major Interests: Early modern Atlantic world; colonization; Native American history.
 
David Levene
Professor
Major Interests: Latin prose literature; Roman religion
 
Paule Marshall
Professor
Major Interests: creative writing
 
Thomas F Marshall
 
José E Muñoz
Associate Professor; Chair
Major Interests: Latino studies; queer theory; critical race theory; global mass cultures; performance art; film and video.
 
Fred R. Myers
Professor; Chair
Major Interests: Research with Aboriginal people in Australia, concentrating on Western Desert people. He is interested in exchange theory and material culture, the intercultural production and circulation of culture, in contemporary art worlds, in identity and personhood, and in how these are related to theories of value and practices of signification.
 
Nancy Freeman Regalado
Professor; Director, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program
Major Interests: Medieval literature and culture; lyric and narrative; reader reception and performance theory
 
Edward H Roesner
Professor
Major Interests: Currently engaged on studies of the 12th-century Codex Callixtinus and a book on the Las Huelgas Codex, medieval music (12th- and 13th-century polyphony, Gregorian chant, music theory and aesthetics), paleography, history of liturgy, early music performance practice, medieval studies.
 
Avital Ronell
Professor
Major Interests: Literary and other discourses; feminism; philosophy; technology and media; psychoanalysis; deconstruction; performance art.
 
Jeffrey L. Rubenstein
Professor
Major Interests: Rabbinic literature, ancient Judaism, Jewish law, Jewish ethics, history of religions.
 
Lawrence H. Schiffman
Professor; Chairman, Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
Major Interests: Dead Sea Scrolls; Jewish religious, political, and social history in late antiquity; the history of Jewish law and Talmudic literature.
 
Mark S. Smith
Professor
Major Interests: History of Israelite and ancient Near Eastern religion; The representation of deities and divinity in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East from the Bronze Age to the Greco-Roman period; Narrative literature of the Hebrew Bible and West Semitic texts; Ugaritic literature and religion
 
Diana Taylor
Major Interests: Latin American and U.S. theatre and performance, performance and politics, feminist theatre and performance in the Americas, Hemispheric studies, trauma studies.
 
Sinclair Thomson
Associate Professor
Major Interests: Colonial Latin America; Andean region; peasant and Indian politics; Andean religion; race/ethnicity; historical imagination and political memory; Bolivian history and politics.
 
Evelyn Birge Vitz
Professor
Major Interests: Medieval literature: performance; oral and written tradition; hagiography, biblical and religious literature; crusader culture; storytelling; literary theory.
 
Peter Wosh; Director, Archives Program
Major Interests: Archival management; American Christianity; local and community history; institutions and organizations.