Faculty, Staff, & Researchers

 

CURA Faculty and Staff

CURA Student Staff

CURA Executive Committee

CURA Faculty Affiliates

Pardee School of Global Studies

College of Arts & Science

Department of Anthropology

Department of Political Science

Department of History

Department of Religion

Department of Sociology

School of Theology

School of Medicine

 

CURA Visiting Scholars

 

 

  • Kecia Ali

    Kecia Ali (Ph.D., Religion, Duke University) teaches a range of classes on Islam

  • David Patel

    David Siddhartha Patel’s research focuses on religious authority, social order, identity, and state-building in the contemporary Middle East. His recent book, Order Out of Chaos: Islam, Information, and the Rise and Fall of Social Orders in Iraq (Cornell University Press, 2022), examines the role of mosques and clerical networks in generating order after state collapse and is based upon independent field research he conducted in Basra.

  • Sarah Lewinger

    Sarah Lewinger is a sixth-year PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology. Focusing on performance poetry and literary communities, her research explores how urban Ugandan youth create full, meaningful lives and expansive social identities amid conditions of political repression and downward mobility. Her dissertation examines how ambiguity – as both a communicative practice and an existential condition – enables creative and political possibilities in spaces the state would prefer to manage or silence.

  • Margaret Litvin

    Margaret Litvin is Associate Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature

  • Timothy Longman

    Professor Longman’s current research focuses on state -society relations in Africa, looking particularly at human rights, transitional justice, democratization, civil society, the politics of race and ethnicity, religion and politics, and women and politics

  • Noora Lori

    Noora Lori is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies

  • Candace Lukasik

    Candace Lukasik is a Yang Visiting Scholar in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. Beginning in August 2027, she will be an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas. Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. She is the author of Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (NYU Press, 2025; winner of the Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies) and co-editor of Anthropologies of Orthodox Christianity: Theology, Politics, Ethics (Fordham University Press, 2025). Her research explores Middle Eastern Christianity and the transnational politics of violence, migration, race, and indigeneity in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Iraq, and its US diasporas.

  • Shamiran Mako

    Shamiran Mako is an assistant professor of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University

  • Nicolette Manglos-Weber

    Nicolette Manglos-Weber is an interdisciplinary sociologist who studies religious community life, focusing on how religion shapes politics and collective wellbeing

  • James McCarty 

    James W. McCarty is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research sits at the intersections of Peace Studies and Christian Ethics

  • Jeremy Menchik (He/Him)

    Jeremy Menchik is Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA) and Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Science.

  • Zachary Mondesire

    Zachary Mondesire is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies

  • Ayşe Parla

    Ayse Parla is Associate Professor, Provost’s Faculty Fellow for Graduate Academic Programs and Policies

  • Anthony Petro

    Anthony Petro is an associate professor in the Department of Religion and in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program

  • Nancy Ammerman

    Nancy T. Ammerman is Professor Emerita of Sociology of Religion at Boston University

  • Teena Purohit

    Teena Purohit joined the Department of Religion in Fall 2009. A scholar of South Asian religions with specialties in Muslim and Hindu devotional literature, religious identity formation, and modern Islam

  • Sarah Riccardi-Swartz

    Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Northeastern University, where she is also a faculty affiliate in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. She is the author of Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham University Press, 2022), co-editor of Anthropologies of Orthodox Christianity: Theology, Politics, Ethics (Fordham University Press, 2025), and co-author of Orthodox Christianity in America: An Introduction (Routledge Press, 2027)

  • Dana Robert

    Dr. Robert is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission

  • Jon Roberts

    Jon H. Roberts is the Tomorrow Foundation Professor of American Intellectual History at Boston University

  • Jeffrey Rubin

    Jeffrey W. Rubin is the author of Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico (Duke 1997) and co-author of Sustaining Activism: A Brazilian Women’s Movement and a Father-Daughter Collaboration (Duke 2013)

  • Steven Sandage

    Steven J. Sandage is Professor of Psychology of Religion and Theology

  • Adam Seligman

    Adam B. Seligman is Professor of Religion at Boston University

  • Nancy Smith-Hefner

    Nancy J. Smith-Hefner is a linguistic anthropologist and specialist of religion and gender in Southeast Asia

  • Matthew Steele

    “Matthew Steele is a scholar of Islamic law and society in Africa. His research is interdisciplinary, pairing the close study of legal texts with historical ethnography of their reception in West and North Africa. It spans the early modern and post-colonial periods in which Islamic legal thought flourished in centers of learning from Sudan to Mauritania. Drawing from legal manuals, commentaries, poems, and polemics significant to that development, Matthew examines how African societies developed traditions of law and authority distinct within the Islamic World. His current book project reconsiders Islamic law and modernity through a study of Sudan’s Mālikī school of jurisprudence. It argues that the school’s scholars resisted colonial efforts to appropriate Sudan’s existing traditions of Islamic law and education by counterintuitively recasting modernist discourse in support of Mālikī doctrine. Matthew is currently a Research Associate at Yale University’s MacMillan Center for International and holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, an M.A. from Dartmouth College, and a B.A. from Swarthmore College. “

  • Jekonia Tarigan

    Jekonia Tarigan is an Adjunct Lecturer and Researcher on the Faculty of Literature and Culture at Papua University, Indonesia. Dr. Tarigan is interested in interreligious studies especially in the intersection with indigenous and ecological studies in Indonesian context.

  • Robert Weller

    Robert P. Weller is a Professor at Boston University

  • Lance Laird

    Lance D. Laird is Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at Boston University

  • Yasir Kuoti

    Yasir Kuoti is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science at Boston University, specializing in international relations and comparative politics, with a regional focus on the Middle East. He earned his B.A. in international studies from the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point (magna cum laude) and his M.A. in international affairs from Marquette University. In the long term, Yasir aims to pursue an academic career centered on teaching, research, and contributing to scholarly and policy debates on Middle East politics, U.S. Middle East policy, religion and politics, identity and ethnic politics, and political violence. He is also committed to mentoring the next generation of scholars from disadvantaged or minority backgrounds, drawing on his own experience as a first-generation student of Middle Eastern descent.

  • Frank Korom

    Frank Korom is Professor Emeritus of Religion & Anthropology at Boston University

  • Iqra Saleem Khan

    Iqra Saleem Khan is an SJD candidate at Harvard Law School whose work sits at the intersection of religion, law, and empire in South Asia. Her dissertation examines how Muslim communities under British colonial rule, and later in independent Pakistan, made the defense of Islamic law a matter of communal honor and survival, following this religious-legal vocabulary from the personal-status debates of the late colonial period to the country’s blasphemy law.

  • Betty Anderson

    Betty Anderson is Professor of History at Boston University

  • Kimberly Arkin

    Kimberly Arkin is a cultural anthropologist whose work explores the surprising ways that a powerful and meaningful fiction of French national community—whether ethno-racial, cultural, and/or moral—has been produced, contested, and reproduced in the years following the turn of the millennium

  • Tianyi Bai

    Tianyi Bai (they/them/tā) is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Boston University. They are interested in transgender and queer studies, with a particular focus on Chinese trans/queer lifeways. Their current dissertation project focuses on two fieldsites, one NGO-like group navigating state recognition through a rights-based framework and a queer Christian church rejecting intelligibility and imagining different ways to live together in difference. This project bridges ethnography and trans/queer theories through the lens of time by looking into how different temporal frameworks scaffold material realities of belonging.

  • Linda Barnes

    Linda Barnes is a medical anthropologist and a scholar in the study of world  religions. She is a Professor of Family Medicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine (BU CAMED)

  • Danillo Rafael Batista

    Danillo Rafael Batista is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Brazil, and a visiting researcher at Boston University. His research focuses on the Brazilian evangelical parliamentary caucus, examining the relationship between religious identity, legislative behavior, and electoral bases through mixed methods. He holds a Master’s degree in Political Science (Democracy and Institutions) and a B.A. in International Relations, both from UFPE. Danillo collaborates with the Métodos em Pauta initiative, which promotes causal inference and methodological rigor in the Social Sciences.

  • Taylor Boas

    Taylor Boas is CURA Executive Committee and Professor of Political Science at College of Arts & Sciences

  • Nicole Collins

    Nicole Collins is a PhD student at Brown University, where she studies transgender religiosity in the contemporary US. She is specifically interested in trans and nonbinary converts to Judaism, and how they navigate both gender transition and religious conversion, as well as other overarching themes such as modernity, embodiment, assimilation, Zionism, and Jewish continuity. She received her BA from Carleton College and her MTS from Harvard Divinity School. She also founded and runs Queer Religion Boston, a map-based project that attempts to chronicle the history of LGBTQ+ communities and religion in greater Boston.

  • Alexander de la Paz

    Alexander de la Paz is an Assistant Professor of International Security at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies

  • André de Quadros

  • Begüm Ergün

    Begüm Ergün is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Boston University and a migration activist whose research investigates the somatic and spiritual afterlives of displacement among Syrian communities in Turkey. Her work explores how cascading catastrophes—from geopolitical violence to earthquakes—are lived as embodied realities by analyzing how marginalized populations in Istanbul’s precarious peripheries utilize agentive faith to survive profound loss and state abandonment. By conceptualizing everyday homemaking as a deeply therapeutic spatial practice, Begüm’s dissertation examines the ecologies of care that allow displaced groups to forge heterodox practices of world-building from the ruins of the city. Methodologically, she integrates person-centered interviews with participatory visual ethnography to move beyond standard trauma narratives and document the material struggles of urban survival. This commitment is exemplified in her forthcoming ethnographic documentary, Hands of Exile: Making a Home with Foodways, which captures the intersection of suffering, healing, and culinary heritage among Syrian women striving to make unlivable urban environments inhabitable.

  • Aimee Genell

    Aimee Genell is an Assistant Professor of International History at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University

  • Warren S Goldstein

    Warren S. Goldstein, Executive Director of the Center for Critical Research on Religion (criticaltheoryofreligion.org), is the Editor of Critical Research on Religion (SAGE Publications) and Book Series Editor of Studies in Critical Research on Religion (Brill Academic Publishers and Haymarket Books). He is broadly interested in the development of a critical theoretical frameworks in the study of religion as a whole.

  • Margarita Guillory

    Margarita Simon Guillory teaches courses on American religious history, digital religion, and religion and popular culture

  • Phillip Haberkern

    Phil Haberkern is an associate professor of history and religion at Boston University, where he has taught since 2011. He is a scholar of late medieval and early modern religious history, with a geographical focus on central Europe. His first book, Patron Saint and Prophet: Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations, appeared with Oxford UP in 2016, and he is currently writing a book on ecclesiastical historiography in the sixteenth century. Phil is also interested in radical religious change and identity formation, cultures of memorialization, and the experience of exile in early modern culture.

  • Phillip Haberkern

    Phillip Haberkern joined the BU history department in 2011. He is a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe, and his research focuses on radical religious change in the fifteenth and sixteenth century

  • Shahla Haeri

    Shahla Haeri is one of the pioneers of Iranian Anthropology, and has produced cutting-edge ethnographies of Iran, Pakistan and the Muslim world

  • Lior Hamovitz

    I am a Political Science PhD candidate at Boston University and CSSN Scholar, specializing in political theory. My research centers on understanding climate injustices through the lenses of kinship and loss. This work combines feminist theories of care, qualitative analysis of ecological jurisprudence in Latin America, the interdisciplinary study of environmental justice, and Indigenous epistemologies.

  • Noor Hashem

    Dr. Noor Hashem is a lecturer with the CAS Writing Center at Boston University

  • Robert Hefner

    Robert W. Hefner is professor of anthropology and global affairs at the Pardee School of Global Affairs at Boston University

  • Robert W. Hefner

    Robert W. Hefner is professor of anthropology and global studies at the Pardee School of Global Affairs and the Department of Anthropology at Boston University. Hefner has directed some 22 research projects and organized 16 international conferences. He has authored or edited twenty five books. His most recent books include Islam and Citizenship in Indonesia: Democracy and the Quest for an Inclusive Public Ethics (Routledge, January 2024) and (October 2026) a co-edited volume, Indonesia’s Humanitarian Islam Movement: Origins, Development, and Global Impact (with Holland C. Taylor, Timothy Shah, and Thomas G. Dinam. He is currently (2021-2026) president of the American Institute for Indonesian Studies (AIFIS). During 2009-2010 he served as president of the American Association for Asian Studies.

  • Jennifer Hunter (She/Her)

    Jennifer Hunter is Assistant Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA)

  • Shanie Kalikow

    Shanie Kalikow is completing Master’s degrees in Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the University of Amsterdam with a focus on the relationship between Jewish religious affiliation and anarchist and socialist political movements. With this focus, their historical research has taken them from the provocative ‘hagodes’ of London’s Jewish Anarchist East Side in the late nineteenth century to the Yiddish-language, anti-religious periodicals of Kiev’s post-Jewish communists in the nineteen-thrities. Alongside the radical relations to orthodoxies of time and place that they study, Shanie endeavors to support deviant relations to the status quo in the present through artistic and organizing practices. In addition to their studies, Shanie has worked in Economic Empowerment work at non-profit organizations since graduating with their Bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies from Pitzer College.

  • Gina Zurlo

    Gina Zurlo is visiting scholar at CURA

  • Matteo Bortolini

    Matteo Bortolini is associate professor of sociology at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and the Ancient World at the University of Padova (Italy)

  • Michael Jindra

    Michael Jindra is a cultural anthropologist who focuses broadly on how culture influences social activity and outcomes

  • Saleena Saleem

    Saleena Saleem is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Liverpool (UK)