CURA Fellows 2025-26
Meet CURA’s 2025-2026 Religion and Global Affairs Fellows!Each year, CURA’s Religion and World Affairs Fellowship program brings together an interdisciplinary community of Boston-area graduate students and faculty. Once selected, CURA Fellows gather on the Boston University campus for bimonthly colloquium sessions throughout the academic school year to workshop papers around a particular topic.
Farah Adeed
PhD Student, Political Science, Boston University
Farah Adeed is interested in comparative political development, with a particular focus on state-building processes. His current research asks why some postcolonial states develop strong institutional capacity while others remain weak. More specifically, he explores questions about the sequencing and coevolution of political and economic institutions, the conditions under which elites choose to build strong state capacity that aligns with their interests, and the role that religion plays in either supporting or undermining state-building processes in South and Southeast Asia.
Marsin Alshamary
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Boston College. Faculty Affiliate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative
Marsin Alshamary is a scholar of Middle Eastern politics, with a primary focus on religious institutions, civil society, and protest movements. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled: A Century of the Iraqi Hawza: How Clerics Shaped Protests and Politics in Modern Day Iraq, which explores the historical and contemporary interactions between the Shi’a religious establishment and protest movements. Her research has been published in academic journals, including The Journal of Democracy, and she has provided commentary to various media outlets such as Al Jazeera and BBC. She has also consulted for organizations like the United Nations and the World Bank. As an educator, she teaches courses on religion and the state in the Middle East, state building and revolution in the Middle East, and civil society and democracy. She holds a doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and she is currently a faculty associate in the Islamic Civilization and Societies Program at Boston College. Her most recent publication is How Iraq is managing the Israel-Gaza crisis
Anat Biletzki
Albert Schweitzer Professor of Philosophy, Quinnipiac University
Anat Biletzki is from Israel, retired Professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University, now the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Philosophy at Quinnipiac University, working on Analytic Philosophy and Human Rights. Outside academia, Biletzki has been active in several human rights organizations in Israel and the U.S. for over five decades. She served as chairperson of the board of B’Tselem during the second intifada (2001-2006) and is Vice-President of the board of trustees at the World Peace Foundation (Tufts University). Her most recent book is Philosophy of Human Rights: A Systematic Introduction (Routledge, 2019).
Taylor Boas
Professor, Department of Political Science, Boston University
Taylor Boas is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Boston University. He is author of Evangelicals and Electoral Politics in Latin America: A Kingdom of This World (Cambridge University Press, 2023). His current research project looks at how religion influences the political attitudes of Latin American migrants to the United States.
Warren S. Goldstein
Executive Director, Center for Critical Research on Religion
goldstein@criticaltheoryofreligion.org
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.
Lior Hamovitz
PhD Student, Political Science, Boston University
Lior Hamovitz is a third-year political science PhD student at Boston University and a CSSN scholar, specializing in the political theory of environmental justice. Lior studies Indigenous epistemologies of kinship as well as notions of grievability, exploring the relationship between mourning, kin-making, legibility, and climate action.
R. Ward Holder
Professor of Theology & Politics, St. Anselm’s College
R. Ward Holder is Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life at St. Anselm College. He is the author or editor of twelve books, and dozens of articles. His essays have appeared in Christian Century, Church History, Politics and Religion, and Society. His most recent works are Reinhold Niebuhr in Theory and Practice: Christian Realism and Democracy in America in the Twenty-First Century, Lexington, 2019 and John Calvin and the Christian Tradition: Scripture, Memory, and the Western Mind, Cambridge, 2022.
John Kapya Kaoma
Visiting Researcher, Boston University
John Kapya Kaoma (ThD, Boston University) is a Zambian Anglican priest and interdisciplinary scholar and Visiting Researcher at Boston University Center for Global Christianity and Mission. In addition to academic articles and chapters on ecological ethics, ecotheology, and mission and ecology, Dr. Kaoma has authored and edited books including Creation Care in Christian Mission, The Creator’s Symphony, God’s Family, God’s Earth and Raised Hopes, Shattered Dreams. He has also written and spoken extensively about subjects in mission history, the Anglican communion, gender and African culture, and human rights. He is noted for his pro-LGBTQ+ activism in the face of repressive anti-gay legislation in Africa, and his work for uncovering organizational ties between American anti-gay hate groups and a notable increase in homophobia in African politics.
Sarah Lewinger
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Boston University
Sarah Lewinger is a fifth year PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology. She spent the last year conducting long-term fieldwork in Kampala, Uganda. With a focus on performance poetry and literary communities, she studies how young Ugandans create meaningful lives and social identities against a backdrop of political repression and widespread downward mobility. Sarah holds an MA in Anthropology from Brandeis University, an MA in International Educational Development from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a BA in Africana Studies from Oberlin College.
David Moe
Affiliate Scholar, Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies, Yale University
David Thang Moe is a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in Southeast Asian Studies at Yale University, and a Co-chair of Religion in Southeast Asia Unit at the American Academy of Religion. Touted by Prof. James C. Scott as “a true gem and animator from Burma” for his enormous contributions to Burmese studies at Yale and beyond, Moe’s scholarship actively engages with four distinct communities—academia, grassroots churches, public society, and political state. He teaches courses related to religion and conflict, including “Religion, Politics, and Identity in Southeast Asia,” which some students have described as “their favorite and most rewarding class at Yale.” His teaching and research have been featured in Voice of America VOA Burmese News and other media outlets.
Johnathan Norris
PhD Candidate, Anthropology, Boston University
Johnathan Norris is an anthropologist whose work explores queer community-building in the Arab World. Norris is particularly drawn to moments when lived experience refuses neat conceptual boxes, and to the ways queer subjectivities and normative structures coexist and comingle. Currently a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Boston University, Norris teaches and writes on questions of sex, power, and queer worldmaking.
Daivi Rodima-Taylor
Research Associate, African Studies Center, Boston University
Daivi Rodima-Taylor is a social anthropologist and research associate at the Boston University African Studies Center. Her publications span cultural anthropology, international relations, and development studies. She has co-edited book volumes and special issues in journals such as Islamic Africa, Journal of Cultural Economy, Africa, and African Studies Review, and is a long-standing contributor to BU’s African Ajami work. You can read more about her research here.
Yidi Wu
PhD Candidate, Department of Religion, Boston University
Yidi Wu is a PhD candidate from the Department of Religion in Philosophy, Politics, and Society specialization. His areas of interest include political theology, political philosophy, and intellectual history. Yidi has a BA in Classics from the Renmin University of China, MA in Classics from the University of Arizona, and MA in Political Science at Boston College. His dissertation entitled “Post-Marburg Interpretations of Plato and the Political Myth of Eros: A Comparative Study of Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, and Hans-Georg Gadamer” examines the transformation of myth into political myth in Germany during the interwar period.