Muntazir is a Ph.D. student in Islam, Society, and Culture. He has a MSt. in Modern South Asian Studies from Oxford University and a post-graduate diploma in Islamic Studies and Humanities from the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London. He is broadly interested in religious identity formation, orality and textuality in religious cultures and the role of space and place in religious traditions of ‘borderlands’ in South and Central Asia from the 1600s to the present. His current research seeks to apply spatial theory and methodologies to colonial boundary-making strategies (boundary commissions, surveys, road building, trade regulation and production of ‘trans-frontier’ information) in the ‘greater Badakhshan’ region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to map entanglements of state actions with conceptions of religious space, self, and society.

Rhitama is a doctoral student in Islam, Society and Culture.  Her work explores pre-modern Sufi travel across the Silk Roads from South Asian perspectives, with a focus on performance and textual traditions in the Chishti Sufi Dargah spaces.  She has majored in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, India.  She holds a M. Phil on the "Reception of the Sufi Landscape in Framing Resistance in South Asia: From Pre-Modern to Progressive Urdu Poetry" from the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, Delhi University.  Rhitama's areas of interest include Reception Studies, Sufism, Islam, and South Asian Studies.  She is working on a book chapter on South Asian Sufi material culture and the making of sacred geography. 

Mikail Berg is a PhD candidate in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean track.  His thesis, tentatively titled: Ethnicity and Crisis: Syriac Christianity and the Representation of the Ethnic Other, focuses on the intersection of religion and ethnicity in the late antique Mediterranean world. He completed his ThM at Vancouver School of Theology looking at the Syriac Short Recension of Ignatius of Antioch.  Mikail also holds a MATS in the History of Christianity from Regent College (Vancouver, Canada) and a BA in Intercultural Studies with a concentration in the Middle East from Northwest University (Seattle, WA).  He grew up in the Pacific Northwest and enjoys exploring the outdoors with his family and trying new recipes.

Changzhong Bhiksuni (Shin Lee) is a scholar-practitioner of Chinese Buddhism. She is currently a PhD. student in Religions of East Asia in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University and a member of the Dharma Drum Mountain Buddhist Sangha in Taiwan. She holds an MA in East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona and a BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University. Her research focuses on middle-period Chinese Buddhism, including Chan Buddhism, Buddhist itinerancy, monastic education, and institutional history, through textual, material, and historical approaches.

Tessa’s doctoral work focuses on the philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis, and is broadly concerned with what happens to ethical and artistic life when the traditional guarantees of divine authority, doctrine, and dogma become suspect. Her dissertation project considers this question in light of the concept of “attention” as a developing motif in 20th-century moral philosophy, psychoanalysis, and modern art. The project asks how ideas about the transformation of the self through ethical and artistic practices are reimagined within these different discourses. She is particularly interested in Iris Murdoch’s philosophy and novels, and in surrealist art. She holds a BA in Religious Studies and Biology from Pomona College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Oregon State University. Prior to coming to Brown, she taught composition at Tulane University.

Bailey is a PhD Candidate in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean track, with a focus on Christianity in Late Antiquity. Her dissertation project explores the development of narrative space in stories of corporeal transformation in late antique Christian literature. She is also broadly interested in questions of trauma and embodiment in ancient narrative. Before coming to Brown, she received an MA in Religion from Yale Divinity School.

Tim is a PhD candidate in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. He entered the program in 2020 after completing an M.A.R. in Hebrew Bible at Yale Divinity School. His research focuses on ancient Israelite religion, the composition of the Bible, early biblical interpretation, and canon formation. His dissertation explores representations of the practice of tithing in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient West Asian sources. 

Zohar is interested in theories and concepts of “place” — what it means to make sense of oneself and one’s community, theologically, philosophically and politically in the context of a shared material and ecological world. Zohar approaches questions about the meaning of “place" from a focus on Jewish political thought, environmental humanities and queer theories. Before coming to Brown Zohar received a Master of Arts and a Master of Sacred Theology from Union Theological Seminary with concentrations in Social Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, they also hold a BA in Religion from Earlham College.

Jennifer focuses on modern philosophical and religious ethics, political theory, and Jewish thought. Her dissertation addresses the nature and ethics of authority in interpretive communities by exploring the philosophical, theological, and political dimensions of the plain sense interpretation of texts, with emphasis on the Jewish tradition of peshat. The project engages postliberal theology, modern Jewish thought, feminist thought, and political theology. Prior to Brown, Jennifer received an M.A. from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis.

Patryk Imielski is a third-year PhD student in the area of the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. His academic interests centre on late antique Syriac Christianity and Syriac literature forming the early tradition of the Church of the East. By focusing on the position of East Syriac martyr acts and council acts as forms of early Christian history-writing within the Sasanian Persian context, he aims to explore how late antique Christians came to understand and (re-)construct their own communal histories through different literary genres. He also has a growing interest in the idea of archives, both as a literary element of historical writing and as a physical space in the late antique Christian world. Before coming to Brown, Patryk completed both his BA and MPhil in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Oxford.

Chandler’s research explores some of the various ways that the categories of the religious and the secular shape political imagination in the United States. His work traverses cultural and political sites that aren’t fully legible with the logic of right/left and religious/secular binaries—sites such as critiques of public schooling or religiously-tinged conspiracy theories. As a researcher and teacher, he tries to combine an ethic of radical care, a deep commitment to justice, and a reflexive attention to his encounters with ideas he finds repugnant or abhorrent. Beyond his primary academic research, he also has a strong interest in board games that extends into his teaching, research, public-facing work, and, of course, free time. Chandler received a BA in English from Pomona College in 2014 and an MA in English from the University of Virginia in 2023.

Vivek’s work revolves around the worlds of popular/‘folk’ belief systems and practices in southern India, situated at the intersections of religion, caste, gender and sexuality. His research explores forms of religious experience and expression amongst women, trans and queer folx from local Dalit and lower caste communities through a dalit and black feminist lens. With a MSc in Development Studies from SOAS, University of London, Vivek’s interests and approach are shaped by his years as a grassroots social worker in his hometown of Hyderabad. 

Vivek is currently working on a project that unpacks everyday experiences of divine embodiment/benign spirit mediumship amongst Dalit and Shudra women and queer folx in the state of Telangana. He is invested in understanding how such routine encounters with the supernatural converse with the realities of caste-patriarchal violence, urban political economies and state-building within working class communities in the city of Hyderabad. Vivek is also documenting Tamil diasporic oral histories in Bangalore and Hyderabad surrounding the Virgin Mary and other Catholic saints as well as experiences of queerness and caste within Indian Christianity. 

Emily King works in religion, literature and ethics. Her scholarly pursuits include intellectual history, philosophy of religion, virtue ethics, and literature and literary theory. She is also interested in questions of ethical subject formation, attention and the self, and the tensions of heresy and orthodoxy. Her dissertation is concerned with how the concepts of nature and grace have persisted and transformed over time, finding expression in thinkers as distant as Thomas Aquinas and Simone Weil. Her writing has been published in the Hedgehog Review, Commonweal Magazine, and the Cahiers Simone Weil. She holds a BA in English literature from Stanford University and an MDiv from the University of Chicago. Prior to coming to Brown, she taught English at a vocational high school in France.

Annalissa Lane is a third-year PhD student affiliated with the Religions of the Americas, Religion and Politics, Race and Indigeneity, and Religion and Ecology areas of study within the department. Her research brings together agricultural histories of the American Midwest, early twentieth century evangelical Christianity, and conservative politics to better understand the United States’ current religious and political trajectory. She holds a BA from St. Olaf College and a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School.

Elizabeth MeLampy studies human-animal relationships, working at the intersection of religion, law, and ethics in the United States. Her research examines the construction and performance of species: what does it mean to be a human animal? She is especially interested in how Christian traditions and texts shape human-animal relationships, and how those relationships in turn inform American theologies, ontologies, and moral identities. She is the author of Forget the Camel: The Madcap World of Animal Festivals and What They Say About Being Human (Apollo, 2025). She holds a BA in Religious Studies from Harvard College and a JD from Harvard Law School. Prior to coming to Brown, she practiced litigation with a focus on animal and environmental law.

Lucy is a fourth year PhD student focusing on the intersection of continental philosophy, literature and literary theory, and religion. She is interested in how religion and literature have been taken up as ethical supplements or correctives to philosophy. In particular, she traces these discourses in the tradition of modern Jewish thought, with the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, as well as in autobiographical and auto-fictional “exile” literatures of the 20th century United States. Lucy holds an MA in Religious Studies from Brown and a BA with honors in Religious Studies from Pomona College.

Erfan is a first-year PhD student in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. His interest generally lies within the comparative and historical studies of Syriac literature in the Late Antiquity and early Middle Ages, and particularly, in Syriac literature of the early Islamic period and its intellectual overlaps with early Islamic literature. Before joining Brown, Erfan completed his MA in Religion from Vanderbilt University. He also holds a BA in Persian Language and Literature and an MA in Ancient Iranian Languages from the University of Tehran.

Liz's research focuses on US environmental politics as a site of religious contestation. Their work explores how "the environment" is framed as a religious issue across political and ideological lines and asks how contemporary religious and environmental questions connect to historical discourses around overpopulation, abortion, race, and gender. They hold a B.S. in Environmental Policy from the Ohio State University and an M.A. in Religion and Ecology from Yale Divinity School. They may be contacted at Liz_Vukovic@brown.edu.

Shuangxia (Sunshine) Wu studies the social and intellectual history of Muslims in early modern and modern China. Her broader interests include politics of knowledge, entangled history, cultural translation, memory studies, and minority studies. She received a BA in Religious Studies and Mathematics from Brown University and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School.