Mark S. Cladis recently published Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination. He is now actively working on his new book project, Just Home: Place, Belonging, and Justice.

In addition, he is writing a chapter titled “Teaching Environmental Political Theory with a Dual Focus: The Cultivation of Dispositions and the Work of Institutional Change” for an edited volume on teaching environmental political theory. He is also preparing his keynote address, “The Art of Being Addressed: Cavell, Romanticism, and the Practice of Receptivity,” for the upcoming Harvard conference on the philosopher Stanley Cavell.

Recent publications include:

• “Spiritual Democracy,” Political Concepts 2026, Issue 9: The End(s) of Democracy Edition
• “What Remains: Waste, Belonging, and the Work of Home,” commissioned by Oxford Intersections, Oxford University Press
• “A Durkheimian Environmental Social Theory,” in The Elgar Companion to Émile Durkheim, eds. Marcel Fournier & Paul Carls
• “The Presence and Role of Ancestors in Indigenous Cultures, Euro-American Cultures, and Democratic Intergenerational Dialogue,” Religions 2025, 16(5), 649
• “The Black Ecofeminist Storytelling of Zora Neale Hurston,” Resistance: A Journal of Radical Environmental Humanities 11.2–3 (Spring–Fall 2024): 112–134
• “Leslie Silko: Nuclear Landscapes, Environmental Catastrophe, and the Power of Indigenous Storytelling,” Ecokritike 1 (2024): 35–58

Hal’s primary research throughout his career has focused on Chinese philosophy, textual analysis, and the classical Daoist tradition, where his pioneering work has demonstrated the importance of “inner cultivation” and contemplative practice in the tradition’s foundational works. His seven books and more than fifty scholarly articles include Original Tao (Columbia U Press, 1999), a translation and analysis one of the earliest surviving Chinese texts on breath meditation and contemplative practice, and The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Government in Han China (with J. S. Major, S. A. Queen, and A. S. Meyer, CUP, 2010), a thousand-page translation and analysis of “the last great untranslated work of Classical Chinese philosophy,” whose twenty-one chapters encompass what an enlightened ruler needs to govern according to the early Daoist tradition. Other books include The Textual History of the Huainanzi (AAS, 1993) and The Contemplative Foundations of Classical Daoism (SUNY, 2021).

Building on this scholarship, Roth pioneered the academic field of Contemplative Studies and created the first undergraduate concentration in the field at a major North American research university. Supporting this venture in Public Humanities, his publications include “Against Cognitive Imperialism” (Religion East and West, 2008), a critique of conceptual bias in Cognitive Science and Religious Studies, and, most recently, “Critical Subjectivity in the New Field of Contemplative Studies,” his 2023 Oxford Lecture, published in the Yin Cheng Journal of Contemporary Buddhism 2.2 (2026). He is a founding director of the International Society for Contemplative Research (ISCR) and of the Contemplative Education Network (CEN).

A long-time practitioner of Rinzai Zen meditation, Roth edited About Tathāgatha Zen (2014) and Manifesting Zen: Master Dharma Talks from Mt. Baldy (2022), the only authorized books by the late Kyōzan Jōshū Rōshi (Sasaki; 1907–2014). His current projects include creating an accessible archive of Kyōzan Rōshi’s master lectures (teisho) and completing a long-term project on the text and influence of the Dao De Jing, the most famous work of the classical Daoist tradition (with L. DiFiori and AS Meyer).

Susan Ashbrook Harvey recently published Ministries of Song: Women’s Voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity (University of California Press, 2025). This book studies the distinctive tradition of women’s sacred singing in ancient Syriac Christianity, highlighting the ritual roles and functions of women’s liturgical choirs and congregational participation in the public, civic context, rather than a monastic one. It considers further the striking imaginative representations of female biblical characters and saints in ancient Syriac liturgical settings, arguing for a dynamic interplay between real and imagined female voices in late antique religious culture.

Professor Harvey is currently pursuing new projects on understudied or unrecognized evidence for women in ancient Syriac Christianity. Two articles in progress focus on an early sixth century letter by the renowned preacher and ecclesiastical leader Jacob of Sarug, Letter 37, to Leontia and Maria, former prostitutes who became holy women: (1) a translation and analytical study of the letter, and (2) a study of the letter’s transmission. Additionally, she is collaborating with Professor Adam Becker of New York University to produce a bilingual critical edition and translation of five previously unstudied metrical homilies by the early fifth century poet Isaac of Amida (sometimes wrongly labelled Isaac of Antioch). These metrical homilies discuss the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan Woman from the Gospel of John 4: 4-42, the longest dialogue in the gospels between Jesus and a woman. These homilies are unique in their extensive attention to a female biblical character who was not the Virgin Mary. Apparently intended for classroom use rather than congregational preaching, they contain important evidence about scholarship, pedagogy, and exegetical methods in late antique Syriac school culture.

Janine Anderson Sawada's most recent book, titled, Faith in Mount Fuji: The Rise of Independent Religion in Early Modern Japan treats the transformation of Japanese popular religion in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries through the lens of Fujikō, a network of groups dedicated to the worship of Mount Fuji.

Her current project is a translation and reception history of the great apologetical treatise, Zenkai ichiran [A Single Wave in the Ocean of Zen], by the nineteenth-century Japanese Zen master, Imakita Kōsen, teacher of Shaku Sōen and Suzuki Daisetsu. She is exploring how this late Tokugawa work was used in Zen sermons for laypeople in early 20th-century Japan, when a growing number of young educational elites in the Tokyo area, including the great writer, Natsume Sōseki, experimented with Zen practice purportedly in order to advance their life goals in the rapidly modernizing nation of Japan. 

Professor Sawada recently discussed this vogue for Zen-type shūyō or personal improvement in a presentation titled “Defining the Old Japan: Interpretations of Self-Cultivation in the Late Meiji and Taishō Periods,” for the 2026 Marius B. Jansen Memorial Lecture at Princeton University.

Michael Satlow's research focuses on Jews and Judaism in antiquity, with special interest in social history.  His last book, An Enchanted World: The Shared Religious Landscape of Late Antiquity, explores the lived religion of Jews, Christians, Romans, and Greeks in antiquity, arguing that they shared far more than has been normally recognized.  He directs the project, Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine and is currently engaged in applying network analysis (aided by AI) to rabbinic literature.

After publishing his most recent monograph Animal Rights and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2023) and a collection of previously published and unpublished essays entitled Human, Divine, and Textual Relationships: Essays on the Hebrew Bible (Brill, 2024), he has been at work on several projects, including an essay comparing animal rights and human rights in biblical texts, a paper on whether woman are included or not included in the people of Israel, an essay on supplementation through apposition in Deuteronomy, and an article on how 1 Kings 2:33 responds to the interpretive challenges of 2 Sam 3:28-29.

Nancy Khalek is currently finishing up a monograph about emotion and pious ethical self-fashioning in the medieval Sunni Near East. The book brings together the history of emotions, medieval Islamic intellectual history, and the study of medieval Arabic texts in order to tease out how traditional ḥadīth in the popular genre of “Exhortation and Dissuasion” reflect and relate to scholarly discourses – in medieval theology and religious ethics – on the nature of emotion and its utility for the formation of religious subjectivity. The book focuses particularly on the centrality of emotions (especially hope and fear) in the construction of non-elite piety in the medieval Islamic world. Once this is complete, she plans to continue bridging between the history of emotion and other genres of medieval Arabic pietistic literature. Recent examples of her work in this area include the chapter on “feeling” in the handbook Critical Terms for Religious Studies and a co-written article on “Embodied Emotions: Sociological and Social Historical Perspectives” in a landmark special issue of Geschichte und Gesellschaft, “Revisiting the History of Emotions.”

Stephen S. Bush is presently working on "Regarding Humans Otherwise: The Aesthetic Transformation of Anthropocene Democracy." This book explores the status of "the human" (and associated terms, such as humanity, humanism, humanitarianism, and human rights) in light of criticisms by ecological thinkers, race theorists, and gender theorists, who hold that the category is implicitly white and masculine and explicitly anthropocentric. But can we conceive of democracy without a special privilege for humans? Drawing from resources in religion, the book argues for an aesthetic transformation (through art, literature, and in the flesh) of how we regard humans, in pursuit of a pluralistic, ecological democracy.