Graduate Students

Graduate students


Sabina Ali

Sabina Ali

Graduate Student

  • alisab@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 334: Tuesday & Thursday 2:50pm - 3:50pm

Research Interests
Religion, race, and colonialism, especially settler articulations of relationship to land 

Samuel Allen

Samuel Allen

Graduate Student

  • allesa@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 331: Mondays 10:30am -12:00pm

Research Interests
Religions of the Mediterranean in late antiquity; the Platonic tradition; political theology; social and political philosophy

Solomon Bogdanoff

Solomon Bogdanoff

Graduate Student

  • sbogdano@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY333: Friday 11:30am -12:30pm or by appointment

Research Interests
Science fiction and religion; religious critiques of technology; apocalypticism; weird fiction, secularism, and the numinous

Allison Darmody

Allison Darmody

Graduate Student

  • adarmody@indiana.edu

Research Interests
Japanese Buddhism; Japanese religions; material culture; ethnography; gender; youth subcultures; religion and/as tourism; fashion; and popular culture

Joseph Decker

Joseph Decker

Graduate Student

  • josdecke@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY333: Monday 1pm - 3pm or by appointment

Research Interests
Buddhist studies; Japanese Buddhism; religious pilgrimage; Japanese literature, ethnography, religious texts, art, and material culture

Sweta Dutta

Sweta Dutta

Graduate Student

  • swdutta@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 334: Tuesday 12:00pm - 1:00pm

Research Interests
Religious traditions in early modern Bengal; authorship, audience, literary cultures and practices; political economy of deltaic Bengal; Islam and knowledge production in South Asia

Blake Garland-Tirado

Blake Garland-Tirado

Graduate Student

  • blagarla@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 332: Mondays 10:00am - 12:00pm

Research Interests
Religious art and making practices of West Africans and the African Diaspora during Western colonialism; Yoruba culture; African domestic and international trade networks; weaving and textile work; African ancestry, ethnography, and spirituality

David Garner

David Garner

Graduate Student

  • dgarner6@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 332: Mondays 2:45pm - 3:45pm or by appointment

Research Interests
20th-century American, Jewish, and Holocaust literatures, specifically examining the precise relationship between modern literature and politics and rethinking that relationship in terms of the Ancient Hebrew Prophets

Hannah Garvey

Hannah Garvey

Graduate Student

  • hcgarvey@indiana.edu

Research Interests
Religion, textuality, and cultural imagination; literature; racial identities and constructions of race; American religious histories

Prakriti Goswami

Prakriti Goswami

Graduate Student

  • prgoswam@iu.edu

Research Interests
Hindu devotional traditions, sanskrit commentaries of the Bhagavata, music and worship in Hinduism, living religions of India

Matt Graham

Matt Graham

Graduate Student

  • mattgrah@indiana.edu

Research Interests
Religion in the Americas and Atlantic Worlds, Religion and Literature, Postsecular Critique, Christianity and Modernity, US and European Christianity, Modern Christian Theology, Dickinson, Kierkegaard

ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3092-5202

Thomas Jackson

Thomas Jackson

Graduate Student

  • jacksthc@iu.edu

Research Interests
Global philosophy; Huang-Lao Daoism; syncretic methodology; creolization; self-cultivation; Madhyamaka; all kinds of underappreciated philosophical thought.

Steve Kaplin

Steve Kaplin

Graduate Student

  • skaplin@iu.edu

Research Interests
Jewish studies; American Judaism; Jewish spirituality and mysticism; Hasidism and neo-Hasidism; Jewish feminism; Jewish thought and theology

Maidah Khalid

Maidah Khalid

Graduate Student

  • maikhal@iu.edu

Research Interests
Islamic intellectual history; Islamic law and theology; medieval Islamicate historiography; Islam in South Asia

Mihee Kim-Kort

Mihee Kim-Kort

Graduate Student

  • rkimkort@iu.edu

Research Interests
Religion in the Americas, Asian American literary studies, American Protestantism, race and embodiment

Ellen Loucks

Ellen Loucks

Graduate Student

  • elloucks@iu.edu

Research Interests
Modern missions movement, globalism, US and the world, 19th c. American evangelicalism, sympathy and sentimentalism

Amber Louisa Lowe

Amber Louisa Lowe

Graduate Student

  • ambelowe@iu.edu

Research Interests
Afrofuturism, Black Speculative Fiction, Phenomenology of Religion, Womanist Theology, and Myth

Jessica Merritt

Jessica Merritt

Graduate Student

  • jessmerr@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 331: Wednesdays 4:00pm - 5:00pm 

Research Interests
Comparative Indian philosophy; Bhakti movements; Sanskrit literature; commentarial traditions

Grace Morris

Grace Morris

Graduate Student

  • graemorr@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 333: Tuesday 10:00am - 12:00pm

Research Interests
Medieval Christianity with a focus on the voices of women and queer narratives within theological and literary traditions

Moriah Reichert

Moriah Reichert

Graduate Student

  • moreich@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 332: Tuesday and Thursday 12:00pm - 1:00pm

Research Interests
Religion and the body, religion, textuality, and cultural imagination, contemporary theology

Maggie Slaughter

Maggie Slaughter

Graduate Student

  • mgslaugh@iu.edu

Research Interests
Ireland; Catholicism; Material Culture; History of Christianity; Museum Studies; Jewish Studies

Jason Smith

Jason Smith

Graduate Student

  • js156@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 332: By appointment

Research Interests
Medieval-Early Modern Japanese Buddhism; Conceptual metaphors; Literary tropes; Sengoku-Tokugawa transition; Neo-Confucianism, Zen, Pure Land, and Shintō; Japanese warriors

Dale Spicer

Dale Spicer

Graduate Student

  • daespice@iu.edu

Research Interests
Classical Arabic biography; Al-Jahiz and Mu’tazili theology; religion and the body; early Muslim asceticism

Emily Stratton

Emily Stratton

Graduate Student

  • strattoe@iu.edu

Research Interests
Religion and urbanity; moral and occult economies; visual and material culture; popular, lived, and implicit religion; contemporary Ghana

Colby Townsend

Colby Townsend

Graduate Student

  • colbtown@iu.edu

Research Interests
Religion in the Americas; the long eighteenth century; religion and literature; critical theories; gender and race studies; gothic literature

Josie Wenig

Josie Wenig

Graduate Student

  • jwenig@indiana.edu

Research Interests
Transgender studies of religion; craft, aceticism, and the body; race and religion in feminist and transgender politics

Alina Williams

Alina Williams

Graduate Student

  • williali@indiana.edu

Office Hours
SY 331: By appointment

Research Interests
Anthropology of religion, lived Catholicisms, Christianity in Eastern Europe, and modern Hungary

Borong Zhang

Borong Zhang

Graduate Student

  • zhangbor@iu.edu

Research Interests
Religious practices and philosophy in early China, with a specific emphasis on Mohism, Confucianism and epistemology; Comparative religious ethics; Comparative hermeneutics in religion

Yuyuan Zhang

Yuyuan Zhang

Graduate Student

  • zhanyuyu@iu.edu

Office Hours
SY 331: Mondays 2:40pm - 4:40pm

Research Interests
Comparative religious ethics; Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism; early modern French philosophy; Voltaire, Jesuit missionaries; human nature