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.

Aseel is a PhD Candidate in Islamic Studies and holds a BA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo. She is interested in Islamic political thought and ethics, and employs critical theory in the study of modern Islamic subjectivities and her own projects of constructive theology. She has published with The Graduate Journal of Harvard Divinity School, The Journal of Interreligious Studies and Middle East Law and Governance. An Arabic chapter on the Egyptian Military regime’s politics of religious discourse is forthcoming with the Doha Institute and Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies. Her dissertation is titled The Dialectic of al-tamkīn wa-l-istiḍʿāf: History, Agency, and Social Change in Contemporary Egyptian Islamism. It investigates the rise and fall of tamkīn (divine empowerment), a political theology and philosophy of history which served as the master discourse through which Egyptian Islamists theorised the relationship between agency and social change en route to Muslim liberation.

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 Ph.D. 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 M.A. in East Asian Studies from the University of Arizona and a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University. Ordained as a Buddhist bhiksuni in 2009, she has since led Chan retreats and taught Buddhist courses to the public. Her research focuses on premodern Chinese Buddhism, including Chan Buddhism, Buddhist itinerancy, monastic education, and institutional history, approached through textual, material, and historical analysis

Angel Faith Calvin is a PhD student in Religion and Critical Thought. Her work lies at the intersection of theory, ethics, and philosophy and involves themes of faith, anarchism, desire, progress, eschatology, and transcendence–and particularly as these themes relate to the lives and subjectivities of black women. Angel is interested in expanding the methodologies used within the philosophical field of religious studies to include the literary and speculative. She incorporates the tradition of black women’s literature in dialogue with more canonical thinkers in the field to do this very work. 

Angel received her Master’s in Theological Studies from Harvard University and her B.A. in Politics and African-American & African Studies from the University of Virginia. 

Tessa Finley is a third-year doctoral student. Her work pursues questions of how we may conceive of literature as engendering ethically and politically formative practices, with special attention to conceptions of prayer. Her research interests include the philosophy of religion, literature and literary theory, psychoanalysis, mysticism, and political philosophy. Her dissertation project is broadly concerned with ideas of literature as a form of redemption, and considers how mystical reading practices and ideas of literature compare with those that are standardized in institutions such as the university or the church. She holds a BA from Pomona College and a MFA from Oregon State University.

Bailey is a fourth-year PhD student in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean track, concentrating in Christianity in Late Antiquity.  Her research focuses on the use of violence, sexuality, and trauma in late antique Christian literature.  She is also broadly interested in theories of affect and embodiment.  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.  She is interested in questions at the intersection of political theology and ethical formation, concerning the relationship of absolute politics and such things as the attention, affective orientations, spiritual practices, and relationality of the self.  Jennifer received an M.A. from the University of Chicago Divinity School prior to Brown. 

Patryk Imielski is a second-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, and in particular texts 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 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. 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, situate 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 praxis of anti-caste, black feminist ethnography. With a MSc in Development Studies from SOAS, University of London, Vivek's interests are shaped by his history of engagement with the social justice space.  

Vivek is currently working on a project that unpacks everyday experiences of divine embodiment/benign spirit possession 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 surrounding the Virgin Mary and other Catholic saints as well as experiences of queerness and caste within Indian Christianity. 

Emily King’s work is rooted at the intersection of religion and literature, with a special attention towards Simone Weil and T.S. Eliot. She is interested in French philosophy, British modernism, and Catholic theology. She holds a BA in English literature from Stanford University and an MDiv from the University of Chicago. Her undergraduate thesis “Poetry as Decreation” won the Robert M. Golden Award, and research for her master’s thesis “A Saint’s Notebook” was funded by the International Ministry Student Grant. 

Annalissa Lane is a second-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. 

Patrick is a doctoral candidate focusing on Religions of East Asia. He earned his BA in History from George Mason University and MA in Chinese History from Xiamen University in Fujian, PRC. Patrick's broader research interests are in Buddhist intellectual and social histories in medieval China. His dissertation investigates an alleged Tiantai heresy in the Northern Song (960–1127), specifically examining how one Tiantai-affiliated group assimilated contested tathāgatagarbha doctrine into their own soteriological visions. This project also explores questions about Buddhist sectarian identity within the context of this monastic textual community centered around exegesis, doctrinal learning, and cultivation practices.

Avery is a PhD candidate in Religions of East Asia. He earned his BA in Religion from Carleton College and MA in Religious Studies from the University of Tokyo. His fields of specialization include new religious movements, the modernization of Shinto, and the rise of psychical research and mind cures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 2024-25 academic year he was awarded a Joukowsky Summer Research Award to fund fieldwork for his dissertation project, which traces the power dynamics that emerged from the intersection of Japanese national studies (kokugaku) and popular religious movements. Other areas of interest include critical religious studies, the modern Buddhist reform movement, and trans-Pacific religious networks.

Michael A. Putnam is a doctoral student in Religion and Critical Thought.  His interests lie at the intersection of theory of religion, religious ethics, political theory, and the environmental humanities.  His primary research explores the religious dimensions of environmental politics in the United States.  Starting from the observation that American environmentalism has often been inflected with a certain religiosity, he examines how various paradigms for conceiving religion have accompanied environmental writing and activism.  His other areas of interest include the religious ethics of American Romanticism, the relationship between religion and science, and critical theories of secularism.  Before coming to Brown, Michael studied at Whitman College (BA) and Harvard Divinity School (MTS).  He has received a Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Collaborative Humanities from the Cogut Institute for the 2019-2020 academic year.

Donnell's research examines the dialogical relationship between faith and despair in relation to Protestantism's various, often disparate, ethical dispositions.  His scholarship focuses on modern religious thought, historical philosophy, and the Black literary tradition.  His primary research interests include philosophy of religion, religion and politics, religious ethics, and Black American religious traditions, emphasizing the intellectual histories of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Søren Kierkegaard.  Donnell holds a B.A. in Sociology from Morehouse College and an MDiv from the Candler School of Theology at Emory University.  He enjoys reading, playing tennis, and listening to music in his spare time.

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.