B.A., English and Anthropology, Hunter College, 2020
Biography
Gabriella Lee is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Her research interests are on New Religious Movements and the ways in which they mediate relationships with and between individual members, their surrounding societies, and access to the divine or transcendent. Her dissertation will center on Jehovah’s Witnesses in the United States and their practices of media production, distribution, and circulation. Combining linguistic anthropological approaches with theories and methods in the study of religion, she will examine questions around the materialization of religious authority through various forms with particular attention to the language and material culture in which it manifests. She is also interested in the interactions and relationships between members who leave New Religious Movements (“apostates”) and their former religious communities: how they negotiate and mediate their identities as “ex-religious” individuals, engage in public activism, and authenticate their religious experiences.