Please join us in celebrating our members on their professional news and accomplishments!
As a reminder, AAR publishes member accomplishments including new publications, award announcements, and media mentions. Share your wins with us!
Awards and Accomplishments
Lynn Gerber Wins Peabody Award for Her Podcast “When We All Get to Heaven“
From the announcement:
“When We All Get to Heaven explores the history of the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, one of the first gay-positive churches, as it navigated the challenges of the AIDS epidemic, including the loss of 500 members. The series follows LGBTQ Christians seeking meaning amid illness and isolation, caught between a rejecting religious community and a gay rights movement that dismissed spirituality. Produced by Eureka Street Productions and hosted by Lynne Gerber, the 10-episode series draws from an archive of 1,200 cassette tapes recorded during the height of the crisis, highlighting the church’s response and the search for healing and support.”
Edward E. Curtis IV Receives a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship and an ACLS Fellowship for His Project Titled “The Riddle of the Evil Eye: Religion in Arab American History”
Edward E. Curtis IV has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and ACLS, for his project titled:”The Riddle of the Evil Eye: Religion in Arab American History.”
Project abstract: Arabic-speaking men and women who arrived in the United States before 1920 transplanted a diverse and rich array of Eastern Mediterranean religious traditions on American soil, but their histories are largely unknown and underappreciated. Contributing a new chapter to the history of religion in the United States and Arab diaspora studies, this project explores their religious worlds, including their practices concerning the evil eye and other forms of material religion, their religious feelings and spiritual experiences, their theological and ethical commitments, and their organizational efforts to establish Maronite, Melkite, Orthodox, Muslim, and Druze associations and communities. Understanding the many meanings and functions of Arab American religious life in a variety of settings from the home to the congregation reveals new perspectives on the nature of American religions in the early twentieth century. In this era of Protestant middle-class norms that included patriarchal authority, US nationalism, white racial supremacy, and English-language mastery, Arabic-speaking immigrants simultaneously assimilated, resisted, and transcended the powerful forces of social hegemony.
Julia Kelto Lillis Awarded ACLS Fellowship
Lillis’s project is titled “Genderlessness: Early Christian Horizons” and “examines a resilient impulse among late ancient Christians to imagine genderless/sexless ways to be human. While several early Christian texts refer to transcending gender or a future dissolution of sexual difference, feminist scholars often conclude that the authors envision an elimination of femaleness and sexual desire, but not of the masculine ideals that shaped their understandings of God, virtue, and spiritual ascent. “Genderlessness” argues that some ancient Christians found gender dispensable and tried to think beyond it altogether. Juxtaposing various views from the past and diverse notions of gender justice in the present creates the opportunity to understand the past more deeply, rethink assumptions on the purposes gender serves, and modify simplistic narratives of how religion and gender intertwine in Christian traditions. Through new feminist readings of sources, the project shows that a recurring interest in imagining or enacting genderlessness is visible in pious stories about saints, reports on gender-blurring ascetic groups, and speculation on human beings’ characteristics in a resurrected age to come.”
Andrea Stanton and Ben Nourse Awarded Wabash Grant
From the announcement:
“Senior Associate Dean and professor of Islamic Studies Andrea Stanton has been awarded a competitive grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, positioning the College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences (CAHSS) at the forefront of efforts to connect humanities education with career readiness.
Stanton received the grant alongside co–principal investigators Christy Cobb, associate professor of Christianity, and Ben Nourse, associate professor of Buddhist Studies. Running from September 2026 through June 2027, the project being funded will focus on integrating career-readiness competencies into the Department of Religious Studies’ bachelor’s and master’s programs at the University of Denver.”
Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra Wins a Rome Prize in East-West Intersections: Arts, Ideas, and Attitudes by the American Academy in Rome
From the announcement:
“The Rome Prize provides artists and scholars with dedicated time, space, and a transdisciplinary community in which to advance their work within the city of Rome. The Italian Fellows Program brings Italian artists and scholars into this shared environment, where they develop their own projects alongside Rome Prize Fellows. The thirty-one Fellows will reside and work at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill for periods ranging from five to ten months, beginning in September 2026.”
Mónica Rey Awarded ACLS HBCU Faculty Fellowship
Rey’s project is titled “Gendering Genocide in the Hebrew Bible,” and “contributes to women’s and gender studies and biblical studies by bringing these research areas into conversation with comparative genocide studies. The book consists of four chapters: an introduction centering comparative genocide studies, a chapter on gendering genocide as a typology, a chapter on theorizing the status of the foreign female captive in Deuteronomy 21:10-14, and a conclusion that addresses how forced marriage has been framed as consensual through a modern-day rape myth that persists to this day. The historiography of the captive needs fresh eyes to historicize gender-based ethnic violence in the context of mass atrocity.”
Tiantian Cai Awarded Luce/ACLS Travel Grant in China Studies
Cai’s dissertation is titled “Waves of the Mind, Ocean of Awakening: Metaphoricity and Embodied Simulation in the Mahayana Buddhist Narratives of Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra” and investigates how the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra employs metaphor as an embodied mode of narrative formation, shaping the way audiences receive and enact Buddhist teachings. Building on Natalie Gummer’s call to read sutras as embodied acts, the project argues that metaphors—such as the ocean and waves for the mind—translate abstract doctrines into sensorial, affective experiences that actualize Buddhist insight. Examining the Laṅkā’s transmission from India to China, the projects shows how metaphoricity operates across linguistic, visual, and ritual contexts, enabling embodied simulation and soteriological transformation. Through this approach, this project reframes Mahayana textuality as performative practice rather than mere representation.
Several AAR Members Awarded ACLS Graduate Internships on the Spiritual Infrastructure of the Future
Alex Gruber, Fordham University, Theology
Coalition for Spiritual & Public Leadership – Discerning Our Way Forward: A Spiritual Toolkit for Justice Leaders
Robyn West, Chicago Theological Seminary, Theology and Cultural Criticism
Operation Shoestring – Enhancing Networks of Support for Jackson’s Youth with Faith Communities
Chloe Landen, University of Texas at Austin, Religious Studies
Religion News Service – Enriching Public Understanding of Religion Through Digital Media
Izzak Novak, Northwestern University, American Religions
American Friends Service Committee – Quaker Action for Migrant Justice
Peter Dziedzic, Harvard University, Study of Religion
The Conversation – Collaborative, Evidence-Based Religion Journalism for the Public Good
Annie Li Awarded Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship
Li’s project is titled “Chinatown’s Calling: Chinese American Religious Activism in the Civil Rights and Asian American Movements” and “examines the lives and activism of Chinese American Presbyterians from San Francisco’s Chinatown, who mobilized in the Civil Rights Movement in the South and the Asian American Movement in the Bay Area. When they returned from the South, their West Coast activism overlapped with other social movements, such as the Black Power, Farm Workers, Free Speech, and Anti-Vietnam War Movements. Drawing upon archives, oral histories, ethnography, and creative nonfiction, this community-engaged work aims to uncover the history of Chinese American religious activism in the twentieth century and create an archive of primary sources to capture these narratives. Forging new historical connections between the Civil Rights Movement and the Asian American Movement, this work also considers how the past shapes the activists’ religious and political lives today.”
Books and Publications
Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History
The genealogical method—a mode of historical analysis that shows that what looks timeless is in fact contingent, bound to shifting relations of meaning, knowledge, and power—has become the dominant paradigm of humanistic inquiry. In The Genealogy of Genealogy, Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm turns this influential practice back on itself, tracing its unlikely rise through Nietzsche and Foucault and uncovering its suppressed ties to eugenics and racism. He rethinks the very stakes of critical history and proposes new tools for thinking about historical continuity, change, and difference.
Robert MacSwain
Saints as Divine Evidence: The Hagiological Argument for the Existence of God
In Saints as Divine Evidence, Robert MacSwain explores ‘the hagiological argument’ for God, that is, human holiness as evidence for divinity. Providing an overview of the contested place of evidence in religious belief, and a case study of someone whose short but compelling life allegedly bore witness to the reality of God, MacSwain then surveys sainthood as understood in philosophy of religion, ethics, Christian theology, church history, comparative religion, and cultural studies. With epistemological and hagiological frameworks established, he further identifies and analyses three distinct forms of the argument, which he calls the ‘propositional’, the ‘perceptual’, and the ‘performative’. Each version understands both evidence and sainthood differently, and the relevant concepts include exemplarity, inference, altruism, perception, religious experience, performativity, narrative, witness, and embodiment.
Katharine Mershon
Dogs Save: Stories of Canine Redemption in US Culture
Stories about people and dogs saving one another are everywhere in US culture—on TV, in Hollywood movies, on social media, and even on bumper stickers. Yet these seemingly heartwarming stories of mutual rescue revolve around redemption through suffering, a narrative profoundly interwoven with Christian beliefs, white racial anxieties, and US national myths.Katharine Mershon examines the unacknowledged religious underpinnings of stories about dogs, revealing deeply rooted cultural assumptions about who can be saved and how redemption ought to occur. She identifies the “canine redemption narrative” as the defining cultural script for the stories people in the United States tell about dogs and, in turn, the nation. Exposing unexamined assumptions about the relationships between people and dogs, Mershon sheds light on the central place of animals and religion in defining racial boundaries.
Stephen Harris and Perry Schmidt-Leukel
Santideva and the Dynamics of Tradition: Doctrinal, Social, and Interreligious Contexts
This collection analyses the dynamic role of tradition in understanding the thought and impact of the 8th century Mahayana Buddhist thinker Santideva.
Organised into three interconnected sections, it highlights Santideva’s Guide to the way of life of a Bodhisattva (Bodhicaryavatara) as a product of and major contributor to the 7th and 8th-century Mahayana Buddhist intellectual tradition.
Across a series of cross-cultural case studies, a team of philosophers and scholars of religion demonstrate how the Guide, a religious and philosophical classic, is being taken up into contemporary academic conversations. They analyze key Buddhist concepts developed by Santideva,including effort, compassion, wisdom and the spirit of awakening (bodhicitta), explicating the role they play in his thought and the impact they made on the tradition. Covering his attitude towards woman, they discuss his use of sarcasm revealing his conception of human beings and examine social hierarchy as reflected in his writings and traditional biography.
Hans Harmakaputra
Christian-Muslim Relations in Post-Reformation Indonesia: Resistance, Identity and Belonging
The post-Reformation era has witnessed a vastly changing landscape in Indonesian Islam, particularly with the emergence of conservative Muslim voices. This book explores several strategies of Christian resistance against the resurgence of conservative voices in Indonesian Islam to establish a coherent view of Christian responses and a greater understanding of Christian-Muslim relations after the Reformation in 1998. These different strategies demonstrate that, despite their status as a religious minority, Indonesian Christians are far from passive and submissive. Instead, they actively negotiate their identity and role in contemporary Indonesia’s shifting political and social context to cultivate a sense of belonging.
Thomas Seat and Sunder John Boopalan
Disciplinary Tensions in World Christianity: Methodology, Power Dynamics, and the History of Religions
Tensions lie at the heart of World Christianity’s development as an academic field. From its beginning, World Christianity scholars have recognized the simmering conflicts between Eurocentric constructions of Christianity and those Christianities in the world outside of Europe. Today, conversations acknowledge that diverse facets of Christian expression and identity are often neglected by academic scholarship; yet, at the same time, many scholars of World Christianity are rushing to bring previously disregarded Christian groups and perspectives to the center of the field’s attention.
Reflecting on these strains, antagonisms, and impasses in the academic study of World Christianity, this volume probes the tensions involved in Christian interactions with other religions, the power dynamics implicated in Christianity’s spread, and the field’s evolving set of methodologies for addressing these issues. The contributions offer scholars new resources for understanding and resolving significant tensions in the discipline of World Christianity.
Lora Walsh
Lady Church in the Christian Imagination: From Early Christianity to Early Modernity
How did Lady Church become a theological person and literary figure in patristic, medieval, and early modern texts? In this study, Lora Walsh recovers a feminine figure whose historical prominence has been overlooked. She traces the development of Lady Church in medieval and early modern England, providing new information and interpretations of works by well-known authors, including John Wyclif, William Langland, John Foxe, and John Donne, among others. She also identifies significant changes and previously unrecognized continuities in religious culture from the medieval era into early modernity. Walsh incorporates literary texts into the field of historical theology, exploring their theological background and identifying the unique contributions of literature to ecclesiological thought. She demonstrates that the feminine image of the Church was not simply a rhetorical convention. Rather, it forms part of a rich tradition that many authors conceptually refined and vividly reimagined over more than a millenium of religious history.
Edward E. Curtis IV
Arab Americana, A Journal of Arab American Life Established
Pennsylvania State University Press in cooperation with the Center for Arab Narratives (CAN) and the William M. and Gail M. Plater Chair of the Liberal Arts at Indiana University Indianapolis will publish Arab Americana, a first-of-its-kind community-engaged scholarly journal about Arab American life.
“Embodying the public-facing spirit of both CAN and the Plater Chair of Liberal Arts in Indianapolis, this journal will be of, by, and for the whole community,” pledged Founder and Editor-in-Chief Edward E. Curtis IV, the award-winning Arab American author, filmmaker, and public scholar. “We will publish refereed and non-refereed work not only from the arts, humanities, and social sciences, but also from professional fields such as public health, journalism and the media, the law, business, education, social work, informatics, and public and government affairs.”
In the News/Public Scholarship
Deepak Sarma Quoted in The Huffington Post
Deepak Sarma was quoted in two recent articles in The Huffington Post: “GOP Lawmaker’s Outburst At A Journalist Sheds Light On A Rampant Violent Behavior, Expert Says” and “Religion Experts Analyzed Trump’s Comments About Pope Leo — And A ‘Bizarre’ Accusation Stands Out“