PAST FELLOWS


Fellows 2007–2008
Fellows 2006–2007
Fellows 2005–2006
Fellows 2004–2005
Fellows 2003–2004

Fellows 2007-2008

Patricia Spyer (Leiden University)
Project: “Blind Faith: Religion, Violence, and Media in an Indonesian City”
Based on ethnographic research in Indonesia on religiously defined conflict that broke out in Ambon City, the Moluccas, in 1999 and the postconflict situation since 2002, the project is shaped by three interrelated concerns: 1) the impact of mass and alternative media in the sedimentation of religious violence and the creation of the grounds for reconciliation and peace, 2) the rhetorics and politics of the mediations of violence and postviolence, and 3) the transformations in religious sensibility during and since the war.


Karen Strassler (Queens College)
Project: “Promiscuous Politics: Media, Democratic Transition, and the Crisis of Authority in Post-Suharto Indonesia”
This project examines the pervasive crisis of authority, a central feature of the post-authoritarian Indonesian political landscape. Democratic freedoms and increasingly diversified media yield a more participatory and multivocal public sphere as well as a climate of confusion about what constitutes reliable evidence, who legitimately speaks for the nation, and when and how information flows should be regulated or controlled. Focusing on four arenas: debates about rewriting national histories, a 'boom' in amateur documentary video production, debates about the circulation of pornographic images, and political scandals that circulate via text-messaged rumors, images, and secret recordings of uncertain authenticity.


Kristin Sands (Sarah Lawrence College)
Project: “Religious Studies and Media Literacy: Teaching Islam post-9/11”
Public perceptions and discourse on Islam and Muslims are increasingly being shaped in new media environments unknown just ten years ago. The challenges of teaching Islamic Studies post-9/11 can be attributed, in part, to a lag in developing educational strategies designed to promote critical thinking skills in all media, and not just written texts. With the premise that the study of media can no longer be confined to departments whose sole focus is media and communication studies, this project explores the importance of enhancing media literacy in teaching Islamic Studies.


Alexandra Boutros
Project: “Machine-Aged Gods: Rituals of Remote Control in Contemporary Religiosity”
The project examines the appropriation of seemingly secular technologies by contemporary religious groups.  Looking at what could be classified as spiritual techne in Afrofutusit conceptualisations of Vodou, Raelian cloning, Transhuman conceptualisations of the cyborg, and technopagan uses of new technologies, this research examines tensions generated around religion in the public sphere as religious groups (and social movements) challenge the oft debated boundaries between the sacred and the secular, mediating identity through new media technologies and techno-scientific practices.


Scott Dalby
Scott Dalby is a visiting scholar from the VU University Amsterdam and The Amsterdam School For Social Scientific Research (ASSR). He is currently working on his PhD research which concerns the practice and mediation of Falun Gong by Chinese and non-Chinese practitioners.

Fellows 2006–2007

Senior Research Scholar 2006–2007
Patricia Spyer (Leiden University)
Project: “Blind Faith: Religion, Violence, and Media in an Indonesian City”
Based on ethnographic research in Indonesia on religiously defined conflict that broke out in Ambon City, the Moluccas, in 1999 and the postconflict situation since 2002, the project is shaped by three interrelated concerns: 1) the impact of mass and alternative media in the sedimentation of religious violence and the creation of the grounds for reconciliation and peace, 2) the rhetorics and politics of the mediations of violence and postviolence, and 3) the transformations in religious sensibility during and since the war.


Post-doctoral Fellow 2006–2007
Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi (Cornell University)
Project: “Word and Image in the Mimesis of Violence: Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002”
This project investigates the imaginary grid that motivated, justified, and made sense of anti-Muslim violence that broke out in the Indian state of Gujarat in 2002. Of particular importance for understanding these events is the linguistic deployment of unusually evocative terminology by state officials, the circulation of rumors as news and of images of corpses in newsprint and television media, and visual imagery drawn directly from a feature film. Ghassem-Fachandi explores the popular reception of these representations and images, and in what way the pogrom can be understood as an acting-out of a sacrificial logic that has special salience in India.


Post-doctoral Fellow 2006–2007
Rafael Sanchez (University of Amsterdam)
Project: “Dancing Jacobins: A Genealogy of Latin American Populism”
Focused on Venezuela, this project traces the genealogy of the present Latin American predicament through a historical/anthropological analysis of what Sanchez calls “monumental governmentality,” or the form of government corresponding to populism as an experience constitutive of Latin American modernity. Addressing these populist traditions of government, which draw on Jacobin Political Theology, is crucial for understanding Latin America today, where they are instantiated albeit in highly globalized contexts that modify the tradition by exposing it to novel circumstances.


Visiting Scholars 2006–2007

In 2006–2007, CRM hosted three Visiting Scholars. Alexandra Boutros (Postdoctoral Fellow, le fonds Québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture) worked on a project examining religious practices in which technological and scientific developments are understood as contemporaneous with spiritual advancement and transcendence. Jonathan Boyarin (Distinguished Professor, University of Kansas) studied recent and dramatic changes in the membership of Jewish congregation that is the titleholder to a tenement synagogue in the Lower East Side of New York. His research explores how the building itself has become a contested object of group heritage, especially for new and younger members trying to achieve a provisional collective identity of their own. Jeffrey Shandler (Associate Professor, Rutgers) continued his ongoing work as co-convener of the Jews, Media, and Religion working group.



Fellows 2005–2006

Senior Research Scholar 2005–2006
Ann Burlein
Project: “When Memory Becomes Molecular: Changing the Biological Body, Changing Religion"
Burlein’s project explores how the genetic body, sexuality, and secularism interact by studying the narrative nexus that links religiosity and medical media practices. Her work asks how attention to the biological body can help us comprehend the role of diverse religions in “global secularisms”; and how understanding the body as molecular has required supplementing the traditional triangulation of the clinical gaze with touch and sound through new media: from MRI’s, sonograms, and karyotypes, to genetic family trees and pharmaceutical ads. Burlein is the author of Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge (Duke University Press, 2002).


Post-doctoral Fellow 2005–2006
Vincent-Antonin Lepinay
Project: “The Media Production of Stem Cells”
Lepinay’s research investigates the world of embryonic stem cell (ESC) research, and the modes of articulation around it, including those adopted by ethicists advocating the presence of Life as well as scientists who spell out the potentialities of stem cell research for the lives—and bodies—of patients suffering a wide range of illnesses, as yet incurable. Because ESC research and debates are taking place worldwide, his work will focus on the use of diverse media, highlighting how the fields of science, ethics, and religion construct narratives around ESC.


Post-doctoral Fellow 2005–2006
Molly McGarry
Project: “Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America”
McGarry’s work examines nineteenth-century American Spiritualism, a popular religious movement conducted through communication with spirits of the dead that re-enchanted technologies of modernity for spiritual contact and connection. McGarry explores Spiritualism’s links with changing relations of gender, race and citizenship, and its entanglement with battles over sex, science, secularism and the state. McGarry is the author of Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America (Viking/Penguin Books, 1998).



Fellows 2004–2005

Senior Research Scholar 2004–2005
Heather Hendershot
Project: God’s Angriest Man: Carl McIntire and the Rise and Fall of the Fairness Doctrine
Hendershot is the author of Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (University of Chicago, 2004). Her new book project on right-wing Cold War broadcasting, launched at the Center, focuses on the fundamentalist radio broadcaster Carl McIntire.

Hendershot spent much of her year at the Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, researching McIntire and other figures such as H.L. Hunt, Dan Smoot, and the Rev. Billy James Hargis. She traveled to the National Archives in College Park, MD, to read the lengthy transcript of McIntire’s FCC hearing, and to Chicago to view television programs by Smoot and Hunt, as well as John Birch Society recruitment films. She presented a paper entitled “Panic, Paranoia, and Policy: Problematizing FCC Neutrality and Fundamentalist Irrationality,” at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference.

In fall 2004, Hendershot chaired a panel on ethnography, media, and religion at the American Studies Association annual conference. At the American Academy of Religion conference she introduced the film Hell House and led a panel discussion after the screening hosted by CRM. In spring 2005, she presented a paper entitled “Deciphering The Passion: Mel Gibson’s Holy War vs. Evangelical Modes of Representation” at the “Rhetorics of Holy War” conference at the University of California, Berkeley. Her essay “His Pain, Your Gain: Jesus, Masculinity, and Evangelical Support for The Passion of the Christ” was solicited for Passion Stories, a book to be edited by Lowell Gallagher and Alice Dailey, currently under consideration at the University of Chicago Press.

In addition to writing book reviews for the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Film Quarterly, Hendershot wrote three essays for the on-line TV Studies journal Flow, as well as an entry on science fiction film for the Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film. She also gave invited seminar presentations at Columbia University and New York University. Finally, she recently learned that her acclaimed book on evangelical Christian media—Shaking the World for Jesus—will be translated into Turkish.


Post-doctoral Fellow 2004–2005
Gregory Grieve
Project: Making Mandalas: The Practice of Everyday Religion in Bhaktapur
During his time at the Center, Grieve published “Forging Mandalic Space: Bhaktapur, Nepal’s Cow Procession and the Improvisation of Tradition,” in Numen 2005, 51 (1): 1-45. He also completed a video project entitled “Ganesh Ratha Yatra: A Hindu Festival in Queens, New York (2004),” based on an annual chariot procession that celebrates Ganesh, the Hindu elephant-headed god, by parading him through a neighborhood in Flushing.

Grieve completed a book manuscript entitled Making Mandalas: Retheorizing Religion in Bhaktapur, Nepal. (Mandalas are Hindu or Buddhist graphic cosmological images.) The book uses an ethnographic account of Bhaktapur, Nepal’s, prosaic religious practices to invite new ways of rethinking and rewriting such key categories in the study of religion as tradition, divinity, personhood, worship, experience, and agency. Grieve argues that these categories, as they are currently employed, are intrinsically political since they are linked with colonial and postcolonial discourses about what constitutes legitimate and authentic religion.

Grieve will soon complete the compiled volume, Historicizing Tradition, co-edited with Steven Engler, which will be published in November 2005 by Mouton de Gruyter of Berlin. Using a critical comparative framework, the goal of the volume is to historicize and critique “tradition” as a category in the historical and comparative study of religion. Besides editing the volume, he has written the introduction and contributed a chapter entitled “Histories of Tradition in Bhaktapur, Nepal: Or How to Compile a Contemporary Hindu Medieval City.”

Grieve continues work on two projects. The first, tentatively titled “Faithful History: Kamas Utah’s Pioneer Day,” includes an academic article, website, and video documentary about a commemorative parade that has always acted as a barometer of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), and the Mormon cultural sphere broadly. Grieve has collected over 70 hours of recorded interviews and 23 hours of videotape. The second project, provisionally titled “Mandala: Mediating Asian Religion and the Mystic East,” will become a book-length manuscript and documentary video that will trace how mandalas and Nepalese paintings have been used in the West to re-signify Asian religions as uniquely mystical and otherworldly.

http://www.uncg.edu/rel/contacts/faculty/Grieve.htm
http://www.gpgrieve.org


Post-doctoral Fellow 2004–2005
Jane Iwamura
Project: The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture: Race, Religion and Representation in the Age of Virtual Orientalism
Iwamura completed revisions for her book, The Oriental Monk in American Popular Culture: Race, Religion, and Representation in the Age of Virtual Orientalism. Her revisions included additional research key in establishing an audio-visual “library” of images and clips that will be used for a companion website.

Iwamura also spent her year at CRM getting two new projects off the ground. The first, “Altared States: The Japanese America Home Shrine,” has received a start-up grant from the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at USC. The second project, “The Flesh Made Word: Reading Religion in the Literatures of Asian America,” is a volume that she is co-editing with James Kyung-Jin Lee (UC Santa Barbara). During the past year, Iwamura and Dr. Lee have organized two panels—one for the Association for Asian American Studies (April 2005) and the other for the Modern Literary Association (December 2005)—whose papers will comprise the collection.

Iwamura is co-authoring a paper with Janelle Wong (Political Science, USC) entitled “Religion as a Group-Based Political Resource for Asian Americans.” Based on recent data from the Pilot National Asian American Political Survey, it explores the nexus of religion and conservative politics in the Asian American community. It will be published in the volume, Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants, edited by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo.

During the fellowship year, Iwamura submitted a new course for approval at USC entitled “Religion and Popular Culture in America,” and she is developing with Nancy Lutkehaus (Anthropology, USC) a graduate course, “Picturing Paradise: Western Visions of Hawai’i and the South Seas,” that they plan to submit for consideration under the Literary, Visual, and Material Cultures Initiative.

Finally, Iwamura will also be collaborating with fellow CRM post-doctoral fellow Gregory Grieve on a chapter for a volume on teaching religion and film (edited by Gregory Watkins at Stanford University). The piece, “Mediating Liberation: Keanu Reeves and the Ideology of the Middle Way,” will look at the ways in which the popular star and his films (The Matrix, Little Buddha, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Constantine) mediate contemporary views of spiritual and political liberation, while tapping into romantic notions of Eastern spirituality and ethnic primitivism.

http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/faculty/faculty1003378.html



Fellows 2003–2004

Senior Research Scholar 2003–2004
Elizabeth Castelli
While at the Center, Castelli began a new project, “The Persecuted Church: Toward a Genealogy of a Political Program,” which explores contemporary U.S. Christian activism on U.S. foreign policy, human rights discourse, and first-world Christian self-understanding. Articles on this project will soon appear in an issue of The Journal of Human Rights devoted to the persecution of Christians in the contemporary world, and in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. “Shockwave! New Media Warriors Try to Shake the World,” an online article on Christian youth activism appeared in The Revealer on March 4, 2004.

During her residency, Castelli also completed two books: Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (Columbia University Press, September 2004), and an edited volume, Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence (Palgrave, November 2004). She guest-edited a volume of The Scholar and Feminist Online, the electronic journal of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard (http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/reverb). She also inaugurated a new journal, Postscripts: Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds, which she will edit with Equinox Publishers (UK); the first issue is scheduled to appear in Spring 2005. Several CRM scholars will serve on the journal’s editorial board, and a special issue of the journal will feature work developed from discussions in the Religion, Human Rights, and Media working group.

Castelli lectured on Christian martyrdom and the politics of persecution at Ohio State University, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Texas, and Brown University. She also gave public presentations on Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ, in both academic and community settings. In September 2004, Castelli returns to the Religion Department at Barnard College, where she is an associate professor.

http://www.barnard.columbia.edu/religion/castelli.htm


Post-doctoral Fellow 2003–2004
Mazyar Lotfalian
Lotfalian’s research on Iranian artists and Islam focuses on “visual artistic representation of war, martyrdom, and the reconstruction of post-trauma society.” During his fellowship year, Lotfalian helped curate the Arteast Middle East film festival and made presentations of Ta’ziyah (an Islamic passion play) and Iranian media at the Visual Anthropology Workshop of the German Association for Anthropology, and the Center for Religion and Media workshop on “War, Religion, & Spectacles of Suffering.” He organized a panel, “A New Landscape for Iranian Cultural Studies: Material Culture, Technologies, Discourses, Figures, and Poetics of Utopia,” for the conference for Iranian Studies in Bethesda, Maryland.

Lotfalian’s book, Islam, Technoscientific Identities, and the Culture of Curiosity (University Press of America) will be published this year.


Post-doctoral Fellow 2003–2004
Jeremy Stolow
Stolow explored the cultural politics of Jewish Orthodox print media, with a focus on ArtScroll Publications, a major English-language Judaica publishing house. Stolow’s New York fieldwork built upon extensive research done in London and Toronto. His book manuscript is provisionally entitled “Orthodox by Design.”

Forthcoming articles include “Transnationalism and the New Religio-Politics: Reflections on a Jewish Orthodox Case,” in Theory, Culture and Society (April 2004) and “Communicating Authority, Consuming Tradition: Jewish Orthodox Outreach Literature and its Reading Public,” in Religion, Media and the Public Sphere, edited by Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors (forthcoming, Indiana University Press).

Stolow has begun work on relationships between the invention of the telegraph and the rise of the modern Spiritualist movement. In connection with this project, he and Mazyar Lotfalian are co-editing an anthology on religion and technology. For the interactive curriculum website Modiya, developed by the working group on Jews, Religion and Media, Stolow is creating a module on Jewish Texts and Reading Practices.

In September 2004, Stolow returns to Canada as assistant professor of sociology and communication studies at McMaster University. In the summer of 2005, he took up a fellowship in Amsterdam to participate in a project entitles “Modern Mass Media, Religion, and the Imagination of Communities,” directed by Birgit Meyer.