- Eugene Igho (He/Him; Georgia State University)
Inherited Wounds: Post-Memory, Oral History, and Religious Identity in Northeastern Nigeria
Eugene Goma Igho is a peacebuilding and advocacy professional with over a decade of experience in inter-religious dialogue, post-conflict resolution, mediation, and community development across Northeastern Nigeria. His work focuses on addressing complex social conflicts, strengthening community resilience, and advancing inclusive peace processes in fragile and post-conflict settings.
Eugene is currently a graduate student at Georgia State University, with a strong academic interest in terrorism studies and political violence. He is committed to bridging practice and scholarship to better understand the drivers of violent conflict and to develop sustainable, community-centered responses to peace and security challenges.
- Arkadeep (Arka) Mitra (He/Him; Columbia University)
Nostalgia as a Historical Problem: An Idealization of the Hindu Past in Medieval Bengali Mangal Kavyas, or Benediction Poetry
Arkadeep Mitra is a first-year PhD student in the Department of Religion, Columbia University in the City of New York. His areas of interest are South Asian religions and politics, Tagore Studies, Religious reformation in Bengal in the nineteenth century, etc. Before joining Columbia, Arka earned his M.Phil degree in 2023 from Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
- Marie-Louise James (She/Her; Princeton University)
Nostalgia and Utopia: Dialectical Twins from Bloch to Boym
Marie-Louise James is a Ph.D. candidate in the German Department at Princeton University. Her research situates histories of nostalgia, memory and pathology at the intersection of aesthetics and politics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marie-Louise’s approach is interdisciplinary and transnational, and she is especially interested in artistic representations and historical debates in psychoanalysis, psychiatry and political literature. She has previously published on recursive temporalities and memory politics in visual media and is currently finalizing a co-edited volume, Uncanny Environments.
- Cecelia (Celie) Fischer (She/Her; Columbia University)
Jewish Historicism, Counter-History, and Reversing the Gaze: Moses Mendelssohn and Abraham Joshua Heschel on Christianity and Covenant
Cecelia (Celie) Fischer is a first-year doctoral student at Columbia University studying the intersection of historical methods and religious texts in the modern period. Her research examines the porous boundary among Jewish theology, biblical scholarship, and historicism. In particular, she is interested in the questions of secularism, pluralism, universalism, and particularism in Jewish thought. Prior to attending Columbia, Celie studied history and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
- Xingyu Wang (She/Her; University of Arizona)
Buddhism in Everyday Life: Reading Feng Mengzhen's (1548-1606) Diary in Late Ming China
Xingyu Wang is a second-year PhD student in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. She studies Buddhism and literature in late imperial China. Her current research focuses on diary practices in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China, examining how they reflect transformations in Buddhist and literary culture, while engaging with discussions of “early modernity” in late imperial China. She is also interested in Buddhism, print culture, and materiality in late imperial China, as well as religion and literature more broadly.
- Chase Viscuse (He/Him; University of Chicago)
Oh, Play Me Some Mountain Music: Serpent Handling, Nostalgia, and the Making of Sacred Time
Chase Viscuse is a MA student at the University of Chicago Divinity School. By attending to the lived experiences, ritual performances, and digital presence of these communities, he wants to illuminate the dynamic ways in which religious traditions persist, adapt, and assert their relevance in the contemporary world.
- Liz Vukovic (They/Them; Brown University)
Christian Homemaking in Digital Space: Nostalgia, Gender, and Hidden Economy
Liz Vukovic is a first-year in the Religious Studies PhD program at Brown University. Their work foregrounds environmental politics as a site where categories of religion, gender, and race are constructed and contested in the United States.
- Hatty Lee (She/Her; Yale University)
Babel and modernity, a work in progress
Hatty Lee is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible. She studies the global reception of biblical material and is especially interested in the intersection of literature and religion in the nation-building projects of the postcolonial Global South. Hatty is drawn to questions of self/other, agency and subjectivity, love and freedom, scattered across the various religious registers within the Caribbean and East Asian (women) writers from the early 20th century.
- Nathan Tucker (He/They; University of Chicago)
“History as It Really Was”: Horace Sorenson's Pioneer Village and the Mormon Historical Imagination
Nathan Tucker is a doctoral student at the University of Chicago Divinity School who studies how the production and afterlives of material artifacts have shaped American Christians in the long 20th century.
- Robin Brown (She/Her; Yale Divinity School)
Death Meditation in the MAGA Worldview: Nostalgia, Mourning, and Political Theology
Robin Brown is completing her final year at Yale Divinity School and Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven, CT. There she is pursuing a Master of Divinity, a Diploma in Anglican Studies, a Certificate in Ecological Leadership & Ministry, and a Certificate in Black Church Studies. Robin is also a Candidate for Holy Orders to the Priesthood in the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia. She is currently working on her thesis, White Silence as Formation in Anglican and Episcopal Contexts, where she examines how silence within the Church—especially around histories of racial violence, colonialism, patriarchy, and economic exploitation—functions not as neutrality but as a formative theological practice. Robin argues that silence acts as a kind of pedagogy, shaping moral imagination, ecclesial identity, and habits of perception, particularly among white Christians, by training communities in what is left unsaid, unseen, or unaddressed. In the summer of 2025, Robin worked with the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy where she observed the impact of William Barber II’s leadership of the Poor People's Campaign. Through this work, she witnessed firsthand the impacts from the decisions made by the current presidential administration on poor and marginalized communities in Birmingham, AL, and Raleigh, NC.
- Karis Ryu (She/Her; Yale University)
Retelling the Marriage Plot: Racial Representation and Revisionist Fantasy in Mr. Malcolm's List (2022)
Karis Haewon Ryu is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, She is interested in how co-constitutive formations of religion, race, empire, and popular culture shape imaginaries of relationality. Her writing has appeared in American Religion, Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, and the Journal of American-East Asian Relations. She is working on her first novel and was a 2025 Tin House (now the McCormack Writing Center) Scholar.
- Terra Sage Wallin (She/They; UC Santa Barbara)
Whose Tradition? Whose Ancestors? Ecological Nostalgia, Fabricated Heritage, and Right-Wing Ecologism in Digital Space
Terra Sage Wallin is a Master’s Student in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her background is in Environmental Studies, Philosophy, and Indigenous Studies, and her current research interests include the digital TradWife movement, far-right online subcultures, Christian Nationalism, Mormonism and Indigenous Mormonism, and appeals to tradition.
- Sam Herrmann (He/Him; University of Pennsylvania)
Geared to the times, but anchored to the Rock: The Value Form and Evangelicalism’s Temporal Aesthetics
Sam Herrmann is a PhD Candidate in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the relationship between religious identity and American capitalism in the postwar era. He is currently writing a dissertation about the role that adolescence played in the development of postwar evangelical Christianity.
- Mina Quesen (She/Her; Brown University)
Fangs in the Modern Man: Crafting Vampire County
Mina Quesen is a second year PhD student in Brown's English program. Her research focuses on the creation of monsters within Latina and Asian American women's writings.
- Jennifer Greenberg (She/Her; Brown University)
Revelation and Feminist Nostalgia
Jennifer Greenberg is a doctoral candidate at Brown University focusing on modern philosophical and religious ethics, political theory, and Jewish thought.
- Hajra Farooqui (She/Her; Princeton University)
The Untidy Other: Archival Desire and Recovery in the Maryam Jameelah Papers
Hajra Farooqui is a doctoral student in the Department of Religion at Princeton. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, archival theory, and narratives of religious conversion with a focus on Muslim communities in the twentieth century. In particular, she is interested in exploring histories of travel and mobility and how women converts mobilise notions of orthodoxy and gendered ideas of correct religious performance. Before Princeton, Hajra received an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from NYU and a B.A. in Ethics and Religion from Duke Kunshan University. In her free time, she enjoys baking, going on walks, and visiting local bookstores.
- Christian Pattavina (He/Him; University of Southern California)
Made for TV! Ritual, Mediation, and Broadcast Nostalgia at Christ Cathedral
Christian Pattavina is a second-year doctoral student at the University of Southern California, where he studies religion, media, and American culture. He is currently researching video games from the 2010s that channel the apocalyptic biblical hermeneutics of 19th- and 20th-century evangelical preachers, and how those games theorize the dynamics of American evangelicalism for wider publics.