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<\/figure>\t\tTianyi\t\tBai<\/p>\t\t
btianyi@bu.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t Tianyi Bai (they\/them\/t\u0101) 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Danillo Rafael\t\tBatista<\/p>\t\t danillora.batista@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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 M\u00e9todos em Pauta initiative, which promotes causal inference and methodological rigor in the Social Sciences.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Nicole\t\tCollins<\/p>\t\t nicole_collins@brown.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Beg\u00fcm\t\tErg\u00fcn<\/p>\t\t begum@bu.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t Beg\u00fcm Erg\u00fcn 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\u2014from geopolitical violence to earthquakes\u2014are 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, Beg\u00fcm\u2019s 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Warren S\t\tGoldstein<\/p>\t\t goldstein@criticaltheoryofreligion.org<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Phillip\t\tHaberkern<\/p>\t\t phaberke@bu.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Lior\t\tHamovitz<\/p>\t\t liorham@bu.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Robert W.\t\tHefner<\/p>\t\t rhefner@bu.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Shanie\t\tKalikow<\/p>\t\t sing.shanie@gmail.com<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Iqra Saleem\t\tKhan<\/p>\t\t ikhan@sjd.law.harvard.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Yasir\t\tKuoti<\/p>\t\t ykuoti@bu.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Sarah\t\tLewinger<\/p>\t\t lewinger@bu.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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 \u2013 as both a communicative practice and an existential condition \u2013 enables creative and political possibilities in spaces the state would prefer to manage or silence.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n Candace\t\tLukasik<\/p>\t\t clukasik@hds.harvard.edu<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t 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.<\/p>\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/li>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n David\t\tPatel<\/p>\t\t![\"\"](\"\/cura\/files\/2026\/09\/Danillo-Rafael_Nascimento_danillo-rafael-small.jpg\")
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