Zehra Mehdi was awarded the 2023 SSRC Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship, to complete the writing of her dissertation, ‘Work of Religion,’ a psychoanalytic ethnography exploring Muslim ethical responses to their persecution under Hindu nationalism.
The Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal (RSDR) Program of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) aims to bring knowledge of the place of religion and spirituality into scholarly and public conversations about renewing democracy in the United States and around the world. This program is offered by the SSRC…
Gaurika Mehta, a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Religion at Columbia University, has been named a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation).
In her dissertation, Bearing the Burden of History: Religion and the Minority Ethics of the Indo-Caribbean Madrasi Diaspora, Gaurika combines archival and ethnographic research in Guyana, India, and the U.S. to examine the role of religion in the making of the Madrasis—a diasporic community and religious minority formed as a result…
Columbia University Department of Religion PhD Student Khadeeja Majoka has been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship from The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
This new program supports doctoral students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences as they pursue bold and innovative approaches to dissertation research. The fellowships are designed to intervene at the formative stage of dissertation development and promote research methodologies, project formats, and areas of inquiry that challenge traditional norms of doctoral education…
Columbia Department of Religion PhD student Zehra Mehdi has been awarded the Core Preceptor Teaching Award for Contemporary Civilizations. The awards committee was impressed by not only Zehra's rigorous lectures, but also her community-building in the classroom.
Congratulations, Zehra!
Department of Religion major and Columbia College student Alethea Harnish has written and is directing a play for her senior thesis. Tickets and information can be found via the link below.
This is Your Computer on Drugs
April 29th at 8pm & April 30th at 3pm
Glicker-Milstein Theatre in the Diana Center
The Department of Religion is pleased to announce that Lily Conable (BC '23) and Jane McBride (CC ’23) are the joint winners of the 2023 Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. Lily's paper is titled “Imagining Ancient Textual Lives: Rewriting and Reinterpreting the Provenance of The Thunder: Perfect Mind (NHC VI),” and was written in Professor Najam Haider's Fall 2022 Senior Research Seminar. Jane's paper is titled “Enchanting Writing: The Writer and Her Craft as Inherently Paradoxical,” and was written in Professor Najam Haider's Spring 2023 Senior Research…
Department of Religion PhD student Connor Martini Receives 2023 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student Instructor
The award will be presented during a ceremony at the 2023 GSAS Awards Dinner and Reception, which will be held on Tuesday, June 6, 2023, from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., in the Library at Casa Italiana. Past winners can be found here.
In Black is a Church, Josef Sorett maps the ways in which black American culture and identity have been animated by a particular set of Protestant ideas and practices in order to chart the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity essential to the very notion of blackness. In doing so, Sorett reveals the ways that Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism coalesced in the modern category of "religion" and became formative to the emergence of black identity in North America. Black is a Church examines the surprising alliances,…
The Departments of Religion at Columbia and Barnard are now welcoming submissions for the third annual Peter Awn Undergraduate Paper Prize. This prize of $500 will be given to the best paper written by an undergraduate for any course or seminar in Religion in the year prior. This prize honors our colleague Peter Awn’s inspired teaching and his dedication to promoting and celebrating creative inquiry.
Submissions will be accepted until Friday, March 24 at 5 p.m. Prize will be announced in mid-April.
Eligibility: Submissions must be
- between 10-25 pages in length…
Department of Religion PhD Candidate Zehra Mehdi has been nominated in the global inspiration list of 100 Indian Muslim women in North America under the category of youth inspiration with a cutting edge approach to PhD research for her dissertation: The ‘work of Religion’: Trauma, Mourning and Political Resistance in the lives of Muslims in ‘Old Lucknow’.
https://www.inspiringindianmuslimwomen.org/global-inspirations-north-america
Rev. Dr. Garry Dorien’s book American Democratic Socialism has won the American Library Association’s Choice Award. This is the third time he has won this award. Previous times were for Social Ethics in the Making and for Breaking White Supremacy. The Choice Award “reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.”
Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien shared, “I am grateful to the American Library Association for this wonderful honor. The book was a labor of love. Writing it was…
Kit Hermanson and Sarah Hedgecock have been selected to join the 2023 cohort of American Examples, a program at the University of Alabama that supports early-career scholars of religion in America to develop writing and research, pedagogy, and public scholarship. Kit is a PhD candidate in North American Religions and is writing their dissertation on nonbinary religious figures of the 19th-century United States. Sarah is also a PhD candidate in North American Religions, and her dissertation investigates nostalgia and evangelical girlhood.