Atikah Adzhar, University of Chicago
Panel: Liminality & the Otherwise: Uncanny Saints and Pilgrims: Altering Temporalities at a Kazakhstan Islamic Shrine

Atikah Adzhar is a 2nd year PhD student in Anthropology and Sociology of Religions at the Divinity School, University of Chicago.  She is interested in gender formation processes and post-Socialist Islam at shrine pilgrimages in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. 

Victoria Basug Slabinski, University of Virginia
Panel: Explorations in Materiality and Temporality: Memory, Homeplaces, and the (After)Lives of Queer Feminist Ancestors

Victoria Basug Slabinski (she/her/hers) is a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia, with a graduate certificate in American studies. Her work draws Christian theology into conversation with decolonial thought and explores constructive Filipino American theologies, focusing especially on questions of memory, ancestrality, narrative, and aesthetics. Her research interests include decolonial and postcolonial thought, Christian liberation theologies and eschatology, gender and sexuality studies, and constructive readings of literature and the arts.

Victoria Berges, Boston College
Panel: Mourning, "An Ignatian Approach to Continuing Bonds with the Dead for Grief Therapy"

Victoria Berges is from Queens, New York City. She has a background in molecular biology at Johns Hopkins University, where she was an undergrad. Through her work in public health, she became interested in the intersection between spirituality and mental health and is currently pursuing a dual degree Master's of Theology & Ministry/ Master's of Social Work at Boston College. Boston College is a Jesuit institution that carries with it the mystical, medieval Catholic tradition of Ignatian spirituality. Currently, she is engaged in research that explores how Ignatian spirituality can better foster the development of the whole child in whole communities, through her graduate assistantship at the Boston College Roche Center for K-12 Catholic Education Research.Through her coursework as a graduate student, she has also explored how continuing bonds with the dead is a cross-culturally relevant therapeutic method for grief counseling. As such, she has explored the relationship between Ignatian spirituality and strengthening continuing bonds with the dead as grief therapy.

Elizabeth Berman, Brown University
Panel: Mourning, Physician-Assisted Suicide Beyond Bioethics

She is a PhD student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where she is pursuing graduate certificates in Collaborative Humanities and Science and Technology Studies. She holds B.A. degrees in German Studies and History of Art, also from Brown, as well as an M.A. in Gender Studies from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she was also a Fulbright scholar and lecturer. She has taught courses on death and on reproduction, and has articles forthcoming on the politics of desire and coloniality in post-Shoah remembrance in Germany. Her research and teaching interests include bioethics and disability theory, psychoanalysis, philosophies of technology, and political theology.

Emily Dupuis, Boston College
Panel: Liminalit & Otherwise: Magic, Myth, and Memory: Rural Gaelic Catholicism

Emily's research focuses on the consistent interconnectedness between colonialism, gender, and power.  Specifically, she is interested in studying women and popular religion in the late early modern period, specifically after the pivotal Tudor reconquest of Ireland and the ensuing centuries of power contestation.  How did women influence Irish Catholic culture as intergenerational transmitters of belief systems? What was the significance of their participation in religious rituals like holy well ceremonies, wakes, and practices to placate fairies and banshees? How did they occupy the liminal space between this world and the next, and what did that mean for their day-to-day lives?  These questions, and the larger context of how Irish women accommodated and resisted colonialism, compose the ehar of her work.e

Lilia Ellis, University of Chicago
Panel: What Comes next? Liberatory Potentialities: Wholeness of Gender: Hildegard's Implications for Transgender Eschatology

Lilia Marie Ellis is a writer and MDiv student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is the author of Propositions on Being Alive. Her academic work focuses on the ways medieval thought can inform contemporary Christian theology.

Charlie Grant is a fourth-year dual degree student in the Master of Divinity and Master of Social Work programs at the University of Chicago. His interests lie in the study of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist philosophy, and in the practice of spiritual care and counseling. It is his hope to identify ways to integrate therapeutic and spiritual care encounters with his appreciation for Buddhist philosophy and practice. He completed his undergraduate degree at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

Devanney Haruta, Brown University
Panel: Explorations in Materiality and Temporality: Piano (de)composition and Instrumental Afterlife

Devanney Haruta is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Brown University, and holds an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University. Her previous research includes projects investigating piano destruction in works of art and music, as well as the soundscapes of Japanese gardens in the United States. She is currently planning her dissertation, which will focus on themes of life and death of musical instruments, and the different relationships that people – including instrument makers, musicians, and museum curators – form with instruments. In addition to her academic work, Devanney plays oboe and recorder, and is one of the graduate student coordinators for the Brown University Shape Note Group.

Jason F. Joyce II/Franklin Joyce, University of Chicago
Panel: Mourning, Hamlet: A Study in Mourning

He is a second year student in the Master of Divinity program at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research interests lie in the shifting conceptions of self and world in Modern thinkers and texts. His approach draws from diffuse sources, but is concentrated in the contours of human dispositions which show up in Modernity. While he focuses primarily on philosophical and theological strands of development, he traces those strands as they emerge in human activities like forgiveness, mourning, grief, disappointment, memory-rituals, and poetry.

Constantine Ligos, Columbia University
Panel:Ties, Ruptures, and Continuities: The Dancing Deity of Death: Becoming Familiar with the Intermediate States (Bardo) Through Tibetan Buddhist Tantric Dance (Cham)

Constantine is a PhD candidate in East Asian Languages & Cultures/Religion at Columbia University studying tantric Buddhism in Tibet.  He combines his background in Performance Studies (MA, NYU) with his current training in the disciplines of History and Religion to study the monastic tantric dances of Tibet.  He is interested in a perspectivist engagement with the cosmologies of tantric Buddhism which nuances ideas of subjectivity and identity in tantric ritual art, liberating it from reductive descriptions in Orientalist ethnographies of the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Jesse Noily, University of Chicago
Panel: What comes next?Liberatory Potentialities: "Your Dew is the Dew of Morning": Rabbinic Eschatology and the Erotics of Resurrection

Jesse Noily is a master's student at the University of Chicago Divinity School with a focus in medieval Jewish studies.  His research interests include the Zohar, Hebrew manuscript culture, and the history of interpretation. 

Zhujun Ma, Brown University
Panel: Explorations in Materiality and Temporality: Were Mothers Doomed? Reinterpreting Motherhood in the Paratexts of the Blood Bowl Hell Sutra in Early Modern China

Zhujun is a PhD student in Religious Studies. Her research interests mainly focus on Chinese religions, gender, pilgrimage, vernacular practices, emotions, and book history in early modern China.

Katie Mahowski Mylroie, Boston College
Panel: What comes next?Liberatory Potentialities: A Comparative Theology of Death: How Kali can reaffirm Christian contemplation of death

Katies is a doctoral candidate in comparative theology at Boston College.  She works in Hindu-Christian comparative theology and is currently pursuing ecofeminist and goddess theologies.  She is defending her dissertation, on Kali and Christian ecofeminist Ivone Gebara on April 9th.

Shreya Maini, Duke University
Panel: Ties, Ruptures, and Continuities: Death and Deathlessness in C.V.V. Yoga

Shreya Maini is a PhD student in Religion, Aesthetics, & Society at Duke University whose research is based in India/South Asia. Her interests sit at the intersection of religion, historiography, and ethnography.

Rebekah Rosenfeld, University of Chicago
Panel: What comes next? Liberatory Potentialities: Cripistemologies and the Eternity of the Mind

Rebekah Rosenfeld (she/her/hers) is a PhD candidate in philosophy of religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research is situated in modern European philosophy of religions with interests in early modern rationalism (Spinoza and Descartes), twentieth-century French and German thought, modern Jewish thought, and affect studies.  

Zachary Taylor, University of Chicago
Panel: Ties, Ruptures, and Continuities: The Afterlife of Sullied SoulsL Prayer and Purgatory in Roman Catholicism

Zachary Taylor (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in religious ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His dissertation, "An Augustinian Ethic of Collective Memory," explores whether and on what basis Christians can justify collective memorial duties in the political sphere. His other interests include religious and theological ethics, Roman Catholic moral theology, the philosophy of religion, and the broader relationship between religion and forms of memory. He earned a B.A. in Classics and Philosophy from Washington and Lee University and an M.Phil. in Theology, Religion, and Philosophy of Religion from the University of Cambridge.

Meena Venkatarama, Brown University
Panel: Liminality & Otherwise: "Black at Heart": Asian Americans and Spectral Whiteness in Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle and Tuff

Joshua Wagner, University of Chicago
Panel: Ties, Ruptures, and Continuities: Quaker Eschatology, Prosodic Theology, and Utopian Margins

Joshua Wagner is an M.Div. student at the University of Chicago, working at the intersection of sound studies, historical poetics, and resource extraction.

Shuangxia (Sunshine) Wu, Brown University
Panel: Explorations in Materiality and Temporality: Nested Memory: The Past, Present, and After-lives of a Journal Article

Shuangxia Wu is a second-year PhD student in the department of Religious Studies at Brown University. She studies the social and intellectual history of Muslims in modern China. Her broader interests include transnationalism, cultural translation, and minority studies, and memory studies. She received a BA in Religious Studies and Mathematics from Brown University and a MTS from Harvard Divinity School.