The Center for Religion and Media welcomes visiting scholars with funding from their home institutions or external funding organizations to spend a semester or academic year with us. Scholars in residence work on projects related to some aspect of religion and media. Visiting scholars must have their own financial support, but the Center for Religion and Media provides them NYU library privileges and invites them to Center for Religion and Media events. For more information, please contact Center for Religion and Media Co-Director Angela Zito.
NYU Center for Religion and Media Post-Doctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars, by year:
2022-2023
R. John Williams is Associate Professor of English and Film & Media Studies at Yale University, and a Visiting Scholar in the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. His academic work so far has focused on international histories of Buddhism, technological innovation and the perceived difference of racial and cultural otherness. His book, The Buddha in the Machine: Art, Technology, and The Meeting of East and West (Yale University Press, 2014), examines the role of technological discourse in representations of Asian/American aesthetics in late-nineteenth and twentieth century film and literature.He just completed a manuscript titled World Presence: The Trouble With Mindfulness (under contract with The University of Chicago Press), which details the rise of a new metaphysics of presence that has emerged within the multi-billion dollar wellness industry–a metaphysics with important consequences in how we read literature and philosophy today. He recently published an essay on the 50th anniversary of the book Laws of Form, and is currently writing a new book on the rise of futurology in the mid-twentieth century, part of which was published as an essay in Critical Inquiry titled “World Futures.”
2019-2020
J. Barton Scott (Assistant Professor, Historical Studies and the Study of Religion, University of Toronto) thinks about secularism, colonialism, and transnational religion in the long nineteenth century. These days, he is particularly interested in the modern history of blasphemy and the legal regulation of media publics. He is spending his time as a visiting scholar writing a book called Slandering the Sacred: Law and Religious Affect in Colonial India. The book examines the sections of the Indian Penal Code that criminalize wounding “religious feelings,” situating these laws within the history of Hindu-Muslim religious polemics, as well as within the global history of liberal ideas about free speech, secular governance, and print publicity. It asks how affect or emotion became part of state efforts to define and govern religion, both within India and beyond.
2018-2019
Liane Carlson was the Henry R. Luce Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media from 2018-2019. She lives in NYC, where she is writing a book tentatively titled Against Forgiveness. Her first book, Contingency and the Limits of History: How Touch Shapes Meaning and Experience, is available from Columbia University Press.
2017-2018
Simran Jeet Sing was the 2017-2018 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU. Simran holds graduate degrees from Harvard and Columbia University. He is a prolific writer who contributes frequently to news outlets and serves on the board for the Religion Newswriters Association. Simran’s academic expertise focuses on the history of religious communities in South Asia. His recent scholarship and public engagement examines xenophobia, racial profiling and hate violence in post 9/11 America. He is currently working on two books for publication – one explores the intersections of race and religion in modern Islamophobia, and the other historicizes the formation of the Sikh tradition around the earliest memories of its founder, Guru Nanak.
Juan Pablo Meneses is a chilean journalist and writer, author of ten non-fiction books. His work is published in more than 20 countries and translated into seven languages. He was a visiting scholar at the Center for Religion and Media in the summer and fall of 2017. Here he investigated much of his latest book, entitled A Portable God (originally published in Spanish language as Un dios portátil, in 2020). The book is a non-fiction story, where he describes and reflects on the purchase of a god in India, the design of a futuristic church in Silicon Valley, and the launch of a global religion. During his time at CRM, the project was highlighted by important media, including The New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Juan Pablo is a professor of Non-Fiction Narrative at the University of Chile, holds a graduate degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and is the John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.
2016-2017
Patrick Blanchfield, the 2016-2017 Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion in International Affairs Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media at NYU, holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University and is a graduate of the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute. He writes about gun violence, trauma, religion, and masculinity. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New York Daily News, n+1, The New Inquiry, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. Email him at patrick.blanchfield@post.harvard.edu or follow him on Twitter @patblanchfield.
Noa Hazan (Ph.D., 2012, Hermeneutics and Culture Department, Bar Ilan University, Israel) published two monumental book projects that had been in the works for many years following her fellowship at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media. Also published during that time were two independent book chapters and two journal articles. A partial list of the projects includes: The Mount, the Dome and the Gaze: Temple mount in Israeli Visual Culture (2017): Tri-Lingual [Arabic-English-Hebrew] , The Minerva Center for Human Rights, Tel Aviv University, and “A Visual Genealogy of a Sacred Landscape” in Israel Studies Review, Vol 32, issue 1, summer 2017: 20-47. Today, Hazan is completing a manuscript titled Race and Visual Culture in Israel to be published by Indiana University Press.
2014-2015
2013-2014
Alison Cool received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology in 2013. She has also completed NYU’s certificate program in Culture and Media, and produced a short documentary about being an identical twin (Separation Anxiety, 2009). She is working on a book manuscript based on her dissertation, Translating Twins: Twin Research and the Production of Economic and Genetic Knowledge in the Swedish Welfare State, an ethnographic study of a group of Swedish economists, behavior geneticists, and psychologists who conduct twin studies or use data on twins to investigate genetic and environmental influences on social and economic behavior.
Josef Sorett is a member of the faculty at Columbia University, where he is an Assistant Professor of Religion and African-American Studies and Associate Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL). Josef is also the founding director of the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics and Social Justice (CARSS), which is located within Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS). Sorett spent his time as a visiting scholar at NYU’s Center for Religion and Media working on his book, Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (Oxford University Press), which illumines how religion has figured in debates about black art and culture. He is also editing an anthology that is tentatively titled, The Sexual Politics of Black Churches. Sorett’s writing and commentary have appeared in a range of popular media outlets, including ABC News, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as well as on the BBC and NPR. He is also a member of American Academy of Religion’s Committee for the Public Understanding of Religion.
Suzi Hutchings was a visiting scholar at the Center for Religion and Media for the summer and fall of 2013. Dr. Hutchings is a Central Arrernte woman. She gained her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Adelaide in 1995. For 18 years she has been working as a consultant anthropologist and expert witness in native title cases across Australia. Dr. Hutchings undertook 4.5 months of research at New York University investigating the history, messages and styles of Hip Hop music, art and dance among Indigenous and minority groups in Australia, North America and Canada.
Professor B. Ruby Rich (UC Santa Cruz, Film & Digital Media), author of the recently release New Queer Cinema (Duke University Press, 2013) spent her fall 2013 sabbatical with us working on her new project on feminist film history. http://film.ucsc.edu/faculty/b_ruby_rich
2012-2013
Natasja Sheriff was the international editor at the Revealer and Luce Research Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media. Before joining the Center, Natasja spent more than a decade working with international non-profit research organizations, specializing in small-scale fish culture and fisheries research for food security. Based in Thailand and Malaysia, her work took her to Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Mali, and Senegal. Natasja holds an M.A. in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism, and a PhD from the University of Stirling, Scotland, UK. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Reuters, WNYC, Malaysiakini, Hyperallergic and the Revealer.
Robert Chang was in residence at the Center for Religion and Media as a pre-doctoral fellow, working on his dissertation on Global Buddhism.
Professor Rachel Wagner (Ithaca College, Religious Studies), spent her fall sabbatical with us working on her new project on religion online. Wagner is Associate Professor of Religion in the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Rachel’s work centers on the study of religion and culture, including especially religion and film and religion and virtual reality.
Professor Ayala Fader (Fordham University, Associate Professor of Anthropology) was in residence to do research on Hasidic bloggers. Her research interests include Jewish ethnography, religion, language and culture, gender, childhood, and urban anthropology.
Roswitha Skare is a Professor of Documentation Studies at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. Her research interests include documentation theory, the impact of paratexts on literature and film, as well as the performance practices of silent films. While at the Center for Religion and Media, Skare was working on a project about Nanook of the North. The book «Nanook of the North» From 1922 to Today: The Famous Arctic Documentary and Its Afterlife (2016) was the result of this research (and some articles written in German and Norwegian). For more information about Professor Skare and her publications, click here.
Chinese filmmaker Lina was a visiting fellow whose stay with the Center for Religion & Media was facilitated by major funding granted for Yang Lina to participate in the biannual Reel China film program. Yang is a self-education independent filmmaker whose films include Old Men (1999) and The Love Story of Lao An(2008), both of which screened at international festivals. She was one of the lead actors in Jia Zhangke’s Platform (2000). Longing for the Rain was her first feature film.
Laura Coppens (University of Zurich), a recipient of the Swiss National Science Foundation and Film Reviews Editor for Visual Anthropology, was in residence with us writing her dissertation on gender politics in urban Java, Indonesia through summer, 2013.
Arang Keshavarzian is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU. His general fields of research and teaching are comparative politics of the Middle East with a focus on issues related to political economy, authoritarianism, and social movements. His research has revolves around questions of change and continuity as reflected and produced by socio-economic economic hierarchies, political imperatives, and collective solidarities. as.nyu.edu/meis/people/faculty.arang-keshavarzian.html
Du Haibin is a Chinese independent documentary filmmaker. Du Haibin was born in Baoji City in Shanxi Province in China, and studied painting since childhood. Du Haibin has made numerous feature documentaries and two fiction films. He was co-hosted at the Center for Religion and Media along with Cinema Studies and the Asian Cultural Council.
2011-2012
Jennifer Deger works at the intersections of art and anthropology. She is a founding member of Miyarrka Media and Feral Atlas collective. Publications that came out of her time at the center include: 1) 2016 “Christmas with Wawa: a video experiment with Yolngu aesthetics”. In Beyond Text, R. Cox, A. Irving, and C. Wright (eds.), Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2) 2012 “Art + Emergence”. In Crossing Cultures: The Owen and Wagner Collection of Contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art. Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art. pp 74-81. 3) 2012 Manapanmirr, in Christmas Spirit (feature-length documentary co-directed with Paul Gurrumuruwuy, David Mackenzie, Fiona Yangathu)
Jonathan Boyarin (The Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies) received a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1998, after receiving his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1984. His research and writing combine his backgrounds in anthropology and Yiddish culture to point toward new pathways in the study of Jewish culture.
Omri Elisha (Queens College; author, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, CUNY. Elisha’s first book, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches (University of California, 2011) examines the aspirations and frustrations of socially engaged evangelicals affiliated with megachurches and faith-based organizations in East Tennessee, and the historical, cultural, institutional factors that both fuel and constrain their efforts to promote evangelistic ministries focused on issues of social welfare and urban renewal. His current work explores the uses of the performing arts in charismatic ministries of worship and spiritual warfare.
Nora Connor was the 2011-12 Luce Fellow (funded by Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs). Nora Connor is a multimedia journalist with a background in labor and human rights organizing. She holds a BA from Columbia University (religion, anthropology) and an MA from NYU (journalism). http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/nora-connor-learning-to-fly
Beth Liu (Anthropology, East China Normal University, Shanghai), a Chinese scholar, worked on Online Ethical Subjectivities in Chinese Dynastic TV Drama Fandom.
Sun Hongyun (Media Department, Beijing Communications University), a Chinese scholar worked for American Documentary, producers of the award-winning PBS documentary series, “POV.”
2007-2008
Patricia Spyer (Leiden University) spent her year at the Center for Religion and Media working on her book, Orphaned Landscapes, based on ethnographic research in Indonesia on the religiously defined conflict that broke out in Ambon city, the Moluccas, in 1999 and the post-conflict situation since 2002. During her time as Senior Fellow, Spyer gave invited lectures at NYU’s Anthropology Department and the Kevorkian Center, the New School Social for Social Science Research, Yale University, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Johns Hopkins University. Spyer also completed several article manuscripts, including “Blind Faith: Painting Christianity in Post-conflict Ambon, Indonesia” (under review), and “Christ at Large: Iconography and Territoriality in Postwar Ambon, Indonesia,” which will appear in Religion: Beyond a Concept, edited by Hent de Vries (2007, Fordham University Press).
Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi (Princeton University), a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Religion and Media, continued to develop his research project investigating imageries, motivations, and justifications associated with the anti- Muslim violence that broke out in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002. He completed three articles that have been submitted for publication: “About Prayer: Abjection and Repetition in an American Holiness Church;” “The Gujarat Pogrom: Sacrifice, Ahimsa, and Vegetarianism;” and “The Hyperbolic Vegetarian: Notes on a Fragile Subject in Gujarat.” In addition, Ghassem-Fachandi produced a photo-essay entitled “Word and Image in the Mimesis of Violence: Transgression and Circulation in Anti-Muslim violence.” While a Fellow, Ghassem- Fachandi was also offered, and accepted, a tenure-track position in Anthropology at Rutgers University.
Rafael Sánchez (Amsterdam School of Social Science Research), a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Religion and Media, made considerable progress revising the manuscript of his first book, Dancing Jacobins: A Genealogy of Latin American Populism (Venezuela), currently under advanced contract with Stanford University Press. Sánchez also wrote an essay entitled “Seized by the Spirit: The Mystical Foundation of Squatting Among Pentecostals in Caracas (Venezuela) Today,” based on fieldwork conducted in Caracas under the present Chavez regime, and he completed a book-length essay on “populism and the status of the community today.” While a Fellow, Sánchez gave invited lectures in the Anthropology Departments of New York University, Columbia University (Franz Boas Seminar), and John Hopkins University, as well as the Graduate Workshop of Anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean (WALAC) at the University of Chicago.
Visiting Scholars: Alexandra Boutros, Jonathan Boyarin, Jeffrey Schandler
2006-2007
Ann Burlein explored the interface between religion and genetic medicine: specifically, how the molecular images of the body and disease are changing religious considerations regarding life passages (suffering, death, and birth) as well as religious identity while at the Center for Religion and Media. Two articles that came out of her work at the center are: 1) Burlein, A. M. (2012). Knowledge is Made for Cutting: Foucault, Cognitive Science, and Intellectual Taste. Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 24(2), 118-142. 2) Burlein, A. M. (2011). The Molecular Body and the Christian Secular. Scholar and Feminist Online, 9(3). Her current book project explores the connections that Foucault made between the philosophical role played by medicine in modernity (The Birth of the Clinic) and surrealist practices of language experimentation (Death and the Labyrinth).
Vincent-Antonin Lepinay (MIT), a post-doctoral fellow pursued his research on “The Media Production of Stem Cells,” comparing two regimes of demonstration—science and bioethics—around the question of life in the current stem cell controversy. During his fellowship, Lepinay completed three articles for publication: “Accumulation and Capital in Gabriel Tarde’s Psychologie Economique” in Economy and Society (Summer 2006); “Les promesses des cellules souches. Scientifiques, familles et santé publique dans la controverse autour des stem cells aux USA” in Sociologie du Travail (June 2006); and “L’Economie Infinie de Gabriel Tarde” (co-authored with Bruno Latour), the preface for the new edition of Psychologie Economique by Gabriel Tarde (forthcoming, Fall 2006, Les Empecheurs de Penser en Rond). In April 2006, Lepinay was appointed Assistant Professor in the Science, Technology and Society Program at MIT.
Molly McGarry (Assistant Professor, History, University of California, Riverside) completed her first book, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (forthcoming, University of California Press) when she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Religion and Media. During her fellowship, McGarry began work on a new book manuscript entitled Sexual Sedition, in which she traces a genealogy of the current “war on terror” to the early years of the last century when the legal term “national emergency” was first invoked in the Espionage and Sedition Acts (1917-1918) and the Immigration Act (1917) in the wake of World War I and the Russian Revolution. McGarry also completed work on A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies (LGBT/Q Studies) (forthcoming, Blackwell Publishing Inc.), a volume she co-edited with George Haggerty.
Visiting Scholars: Gregg Bordowitz, Alisa Lebow
2005-2006
Greg Grieve, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Religion and Media, completed a book entitled Retheorizing Religion in Nepal (2006, Palgrave Macmillan). Grieve published “Forging Mandalic Space: Bhaktapur, Nepal’s Cow Procession and the Improvisation of Tradition,” in Numen 2005, 51 (1): 1-45. He also completed a video project entitled “Ganesh Ratha Yatra: A Hindu Festival in Queens, New York (2004),” based on an annual chariot procession that celebrates Ganesh, the Hindu elephant-headed god, by parading him through a neighborhood in Flushing. Grieve continues work on two projects. The first, “Faithful History: Kamas, Utah’s Pioneer Day,” includes an academic article, website, and video documentary about a commemorative parade that has always acted as a barometer of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), and the Mormon cultural sphere more broadly. The second project, “Mandala: Mediating Asian Religion and the Mystic East,” will become a book-length manuscript and documentary video that will trace how mandalas and Nepalese paintings have been used in the West to re-signify Asian religions as uniquely mystical and otherworldly.
Heather Hendershot’s new book project on right-wing Cold War broadcasting focuses on the fundamentalist radio broadcaster Carl McIntire. In fall 2004, at the American Academy of Religion meetings, Hendershot introduced the film Hell House and led a panel discussion after the screening hosted by CRM. In spring 2005, she presented a paper entitled “Deciphering The Passion: Mel Gibson’s Holy War vs. Evangelical Modes of Representation” at the “Rhetorics of Holy War” conference at the University of California, Berkeley. Her essay “His Pain, Your Gain: Jesus, Masculinity, and Evangelical Support for The Passion of the Christ” was solicited for Passion Stories, a book to be edited by Lowell Gallagher and Alice Dailey. In addition to writing book reviews for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Film Quarterly, Hendershot wrote three essays for the on-line TV Studies journal Flow. She also gave invited seminar presentations at Columbia University and New York University. Finally, she recently learned that her acclaimed book on evangelical Christian media—Shaking the World for Jesus—will be translated into Turkish.
Jane Iwamura, a post-doctoral fellow at the CEnter, completed revisions for her book, The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture: Race, Religion, and Representation in the Age of Virtual Orientalism. Iwamura also spent her year at CRM getting two new projects off the ground. The first,“Altared States: The Japanese American Home Shrine,” has received a start-up grant from the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at USC. The second project, “The Flesh Made Word: Reading Religion in the Literatures of Asian America,” is a volume co-edited with James Kyung-Jin Lee (UC Santa Barbara). Finally, Iwamura will also be collaborating with fellow CRM post-doctoral fellow Greg Grieve on a chapter for a volume on teaching religion and film (edited by Gregory Watkins at Stanford University). The piece, “Mediating Liberation: Keanu Reeves and the Ideology of the Middle Way,” will look at the ways in which the popular star and his films (The Matrix, Little Buddha, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Constantine) mediate contemporary views of spiritual and political liberation, while tapping into romantic notions of Eastern spirituality and ethnic primitivism.
2004-2005
Elizabeth A. Castelli is Professor of Religion and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women at Barnard College. Her research at the NYU Center for Religion and Media in its inaugural year in 2003-2004 focused on the logics and language of persecution among contemporary Christian communities. She is currently writing a book about confession. During her time at the Center for Religion and Media, Castelli produced numerous essays, including: 1) “‘When You See Blood, It Brings Truth’: Catholic Ritual and Resistance in a Time of War,” in Things: Material Religion and the Topographies of Divine Spaces, ed. Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer (NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), 232-249. 2)”The Ambivalent Legacy of Violence and Victimhood: Using Early Christian Martyrs to Think With,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 6 (2006): 1-24.
Mazyar Lotfalian is an independent scholar. His current work focuses on the intersection of public anthropology and urban politics. He received his BA from UC Berkeley and PhD from Rice University. He has taught at several universities, including Yale, Pittsburgh, and Emerson College, and worked as Assistant Director of Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He spent a year as an inaugural post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Religion and Media. His recent book is the result of research that he started at this center. The book is entitled What People Do with Images: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Production of Iranian Visual Culture in Transnational Circuits, Sean Kingston Press 2020. See book updates on his amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Mazyar-Lotfalian/e/B0034P02KG%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
Jeremy Stolow was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Religion and Media from 2003-2004, as well as for several months in 2008. He has been on the Center’s International Advisory Board since 2005. During his first affiliation at the CRM, he conducted research that led eventually to his first book, Orthodox By Design: Judaism, Print Politics, and the ArtScroll Revolution. During his second visit at the CRM, he conducted some research leading to his edited book, Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology and the Things in Between. Currently, he is writing a book, “Picturing Aura”, which traces roughly 150 years of efforts to photograph ’the human aura’, and the lives of such images in the domains of psychical research, art photography, alternative medicine, and New Age spirituality.