Graduate Students

Graduate students

Sabina Ali

Sabina Ali

Graduate Student

  • alisab@iu.edu

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

Samuel Allen

Samuel Allen

Graduate Student

  • allesa@iu.edu
  • SY332

Office Hours
Mondays 10:30am - 2:30pm

Research Interests
Greco-Roman intellectual and reception history, theories of providence, the ecclesiastical historians, Iamblichus, political theology, social and political philosophy

Kavin Chada

Kavin Chada

Graduate Student

  • kchada@iu.edu

Research Interests
Kant, ethics, Early Buddhism, philosophy of religion, Marx, social and political philosophy 

Allison Darmody

Allison Darmody

Graduate Student

  • adarmody@iu.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

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

Alana Dickey

Alana Dickey

Graduate Student

  • aladicke@iu.edu

Research Interests
Disability, gender, and sexuality in Baha’i law and early American Baha’i history

Sweta Dutta

Sweta Dutta

Graduate Student

  • swdutta@iu.edu
  • SY334

Office Hours
Mondays 11:00am - 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

Anton Ermakov

Anton Ermakov

Graduate Student

  • antermak@iu.edu
  • SY334

Office Hours
Tuesdays 11:00am - 1:00pm, or by appointment

Research Interests
Buddhism in Mongolia and Eastern Siberia; history of Buddhist studies, particularly in Russia and the USSR; religion and atheism in the Soviet Union; secular ritual

David Garner

David Garner

Graduate Student

  • dgarner6@iu.edu

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

Jacob Gonzales

Jacob Gonzales

Graduate Student

  • jargonza@iu.edu

Research Interests
Reformed and Calvinistic Protestantism; comparative sexual histories and ethics within Christianity; Augustinianism; religion of the body; biopolitics; cosmologies and apocalypses; epistemologies, hermeneutics, textualities, and semiotics 

Benjamin Huston

Benjamin Huston

Graduate Student

  • bendhust@iu.edu
  • SY331

Office Hours
Mondays 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Research Interests
Catholic monastic communities in the United States, and their relationship to the communities that surround them, both secular and religious

Thomas Clarke Jackson

Thomas Clarke Jackson

Graduate Student

  • jacksthc@iu.edu
  • SY331

Office Hours
By appointment

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

Elisabeth K. Jones

Elisabeth K. Jones

Graduate Student

  • joneelis@iu.edu
  • SY333

Office Hours
Wednesdays 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Research Interests
Feminist and Indigenous religious studies; ritual theory; embodied sanctity and prohibition; Hawaiian cosmogony and birthing moʻolelo; comparative traditions of feminine creative power

Kien T. Le

Kien T. Le

Graduate Student

  • kienle@iu.edu
  • SY331

Office Hours
Mondays and Wednesdays 11:00am - 12:00pm, or by appointment

Research Interests
Hermeneutics, narratology, and performativity; reparative scholarship; affections of ordinary Buddhists; Buddhist phenomenology and metapsychology; Buddhist intellectual and reception history; early/medieval Indic Buddhist texts; Buddhism(s) in Vietnam

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

Colin Madison

Colin Madison

Graduate Student

  • colimadi@iu.edu
  • SY332

Office Hours
Thursdays 2:30pm - 4:30pm

Research Interests
African and African Diaspora Religions; Africana Philosophy; Ritual Studies; Religion and the Arts 

Joanna Martin

Joanna Martin

Graduate Student

  • jem35@iu.edu
  • SY333

Office Hours
By appointment

Research Interests
Jewishness/Judaism; Messianic Judaism; identity and religious authenticity; African, African American, and Caribbean communities; Igbo people of Nigeria; identity, diaspora, genetics, and religious boundaries; interpretations of genetic science

Grace Morris

Grace Morris

Graduate Student

  • graemorr@iu.edu
  • SY333

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

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

Keegan Nichols

Keegan Nichols

Graduate Student

  • keegnich@iu.edu

Research Interests
Global philosophy, 18th and 19th-century German intellectual history (esp. German Idealism), the problem of evil, philosophy of religion, political theory

Moriah Reichert

Moriah Reichert

Graduate Student

  • moreich@iu.edu

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

Jason Smith

Jason Smith

Graduate Student

  • js156@iu.edu
  • SY332

Office Hours
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

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

Kathryn Vandrey

Kathryn Vandrey

Graduate Student

  • kvandrey@iu.edu

Research Interests
Confucianism, ritual studies, epistemology of early China, religion and gender, religious borrowing, funerary practices

Jaime Weaver

Jaime Weaver

Graduate Student

  • jaiweav@iu.edu
  • SY332

Office Hours
Tuesdays 2:30pm - 4:30pm

Research Interests
Ritual studies; performance of religion; religious embodiment; theater and religion; Buddhist traditions; Buddhist diaspora; countercultural religious practice; Pyrrhonian skepticism; philosophy of religion. 

Alina Williams

Alina Williams

Graduate Student

  • williali@iu.edu

Research Interests
Religion, politics, and political theology; Catholic studies; religion, law, and governance; secularism and communism; religion in Europe; Eastern Europe; Hungarian studies

Borong Zhang

Borong Zhang

Graduate Student

  • zhangbor@iu.edu
  • SY331

Office Hours
Thursdays 12:00pm - 2:00pm

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

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

Alex Zhou

Alex Zhou

Graduate Student

  • yz181@iu.edu

Research Interests
Comparative studies between Greek and China, Classical Chinese thoughts, Zhuangzi, Ancient Greek philosophy, Plato