CURA Colloquium Fellows 2019-2020
Ellie Ash, PhD Student, Graduate Division of Religious Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
Ellie Ash is a doctoral student in the Graduate Division of Religious Studies at BU, focusing on contemporary American Judaism and working under Nancy Ammerman. She is interested in the social construction of religious commitment and the influence of formal religious ideology on lay practices and understandings and hopes to write about these themes in connection to the place of Jewish law in Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish religiosity in North America.
Hafsa Arain, Phd Student, Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences
Hafsa Arain is a third year PhD student in sociocultural anthropology at Boston University focusing on queerness and youth culture in urban Pakistan. Her research explores the growth of LGBTQ+ identification among upper and middle class young people in Karachi, Pakistan¹s most populous city. Before moving to Boston, Hafsa worked in university administration and chaplaincy at Claremont School of Theology, where she also received her master¹s degree in Islamic studies.
Erick Berrelleza, PhD Candidate, Sociology, College of Arts and Sciences
Erick Berrelleza is a doctoral candidate in sociology in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. His research interests lie at the intersection of the sociology of religion, urban & community studies, and immigration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in North Carolina, his dissertation – The Religious Lives of Latin American Immigrants: Geographies and Shifting Landscapes in the New South – examines the lived religious practices of Latin Americans in relation to space and place. He takes a comparative approach in this project, focusing on participants’ everyday lives in a metropolitan center and a rural town. He is the 2019-2020 Visiting Scholar at the Boisi Center for Religion & American Public Life at Boston College. While at CURA, Erick will be exploring the making of immigrant religious activists in the New Sanctuary Movement.
Sean Desilets, Senior Lecturer, Writing Program, College of Arts and Sciences
Sean Desilets is a Senior Lecturer in the CAS Writing Program. He also teaches in the Kilachand Honors College; the Core Program; and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Before moving to BU in 2017, he was Associate Professor and Chair of Film Studies at Westminster College in Salt Lake City. He is author of Hermeneutic Humility and the Political Theology of Cinema: Paul Paul (Routledge, 2017). His new book project is tentatively titled A Theology of Media: Migration, Expenditure, Revelation. In this book, Desilets intends to theorize our contemporary media environment in terms of cataphatic theology.
Daryl Ireland, Research Assistant Professor, School of Theology
Daryl Ireland is the Associate Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University, and Research Assistant Professor of Christian Mission. He has spearheaded several Digital Humanities projects, including one sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation on Chinese Christian visual culture (ccposters.com). His most recent research has been on the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, and the reconfiguration of mainline Protestant conceptions of missions.
Kelly Keenan, PhD Student, Romance Studies, College of Arts and Sciences
Kelly Keenan is in her third-year in the department of Romance Studies at Boston University, pursuing a PhD in French Language and Literature. She holds an BA in French from Loyola University Maryland. Broadly, her research interests lie at the intersection of gender and religion in French literature. She is particularly interested in literary representations of gender and religion as they interact with depictions of the family, with a focus on 19thcentury literature.
Lance D. Laird, Th.D., Assistant Professor, Boston University School of Medicine and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Lance D. Laird is Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and active in the Graduate Program in Religion. He completed his Th.D. in Comparative Religion and Christian-Muslim Relations at Harvard Divinity School. Since coming to Boston University in 2004, he has completed a post-doctoral fellowship in General Pediatrics and become Assistant Director of the MS program in Medical Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Practice. With a research focus on religions, medicines, and healing, Lance has published a variety of articles on American Muslims and health disparities, free clinics, physician identities, oral health practices, neighborhood health assets, and pathways to healthcare in Boston. He is currently conducting research on Muslim chaplaincy.
Jesse Lamba, Undergraduate Student, Pardee School of Global Studies
Jesse Lamba is a rising junior majoring in international affairs and public relations with a focus on the middle east. On campus, Jesse is involved in biomedical research, the club golf team and sits on the executive board of the Boston University International Affairs Association (BUIAA) among other student organizations. His topic for CURA focuses on a burgeoning Sikh identity in the Punjab region and the interpretation of key cultural symbols. Outside of school, Jesse enjoys watching Premier League, eating Italian food and reading spy novels.
Claire (Seulgie) Lim, PhD Student, Political Science, College of Arts and Sciences
Claire (Seulgie) Lim is a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department at BU, focusing on African studies. She received her B.A. in International Relations, with a minor in English Literature, and an M.A. in International Cooperation at the Graduate School of International Studies, both at Seoul National University, South Korea. Her interests include comparative politics, international relations, women’s political participation, civil society, feminism/feminist theory, and religion. Her current research includes the evolution of political participation and gender parity in Senegal, and how the political aspect intertwines with the religious and social aspect.
Nicolette Manglos-Weber, Assistant Professor, School of Theology
Nicolette Manglos-Weber is Assistant Professor of Religion & Society at Boston University School of Theology, working in the subfields of Lived Religion, Congregational Studies, Political Sociology, Cultural Sociology, and Global Christianity. Her interest is in how religious communal practices shape people¹s identities and social relations, and how religious and political institutions intersect more broadly. Her work is multi-method, employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches; and transnational, with a special focus on Evangelicalism in Africa and the Diaspora, as well as U.S. immigrant religion. She is the author of Joining the Choir: Religious Memberships and Social Trust among Transnational Ghanaians (Oxford University Press, 2018); and is currently working on a project about popular religion and women nonprofit leaders in Uganda.
Sheila Otieno, PhD Student, School of Theology
Sheila Otieno is a self-proclaimed Africanist and current doctoral student at Boston University School of Theology (Boston, MA) pursuing a PhD in Social Ethics. Training to be a comparative ethicist, Sheila received a Master of Divinity degree with a concentration in Religion and Ethics from Candler School of Theology (Emory University, Atlanta, GA) in 2015 and later a Master of Theology in Ethics from Duke Divinity School (Duke University, Durham, NC) in 2016. Originally from Nairobi, Kenya, Sheila is passionate about building epistemological tools and methods for doing African Social Ethics that speak to African contexts and dissect ethical issues particular to Africa. Her research interests lie in global political theory, transnationalism, postcolonial approaches, religious ethics and cultural influences on religious and moral formation. Her doctoral research will focus primarily on the concept of personhood and perceptions of African community in relationship, mining sources from cultural value systems that have contributed to social and moral formations on the continent as transferred through African religiosity, ethnicity and political systems.
Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor, Pardee School of Global Studies
Jayita Sarkar is assistant professor at Boston University¹s School of Global Studies. Her expertise is in twentieth-century global history, United States foreign relations history, history of technology, partitions and Asia-Europe. Her research has been published in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Cold War History, International History Review, and elsewhere. Her first book project, Ploughshares & Swords, examines the global history of India’s nuclear program. Concurrently, she has two ongoing single-authored book-length projects: one, on the role of corporations, banks and the state to export light water reactors to expand U.S. global power from the 1950s until the 1980s, and the other, on the global intellectual history of partitions as an external tool of state-making in the twentieth-century, 1900-1945. She obtained her Ph.D. in History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland, and has held fellowships at Yale, Harvard, MIT and Dartmouth College. Her research project as a CURA Colloquium Fellow is entitled, “Battlefields to Borderlands: Religion and the Rohingya Question, 1942-1952,” which is associated with her larger book-length project on partitions.
Mahtab Sirdani , PhD Student, Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences
Mahtab Sirdani is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Boston University. She completed her Master of Theology at Harvard Divinity School where her area of concentration was on the religion, literature, and cultures of Muslims, especially the experience of Muslim women in the West. Her current research in anthropology focuses on Muslims in exile, especially the situation of Iranian Muslim migrants in America, a minority group that gets little attention in public discussions.
Brother Lawrence A. Whitney, PhD, LC†, University Chaplain
Brother Lawrence A. Whitney, PhD, LC† serves as University Chaplain for Community Life at Marsh Chapel. His research is in comparative and multidisciplinary approaches to religious philosophy and social theory, working especially at the intersection of Western and Chinese philosophies, theologies, and ritual theories. His paper for the colloquium explores how Confucian religiosity resists the idea of religion as a category of identity in the ways in which social scientists often presume.