The 2008-2009 Marty Center Fellows

 

The Martin Marty Center, continuing its emphasis on global interactions and aspects of religion, will have four senior fellows, one associate, and twelve dissertation (junior) fellows in 2008-09. This year's Marty Center dissertation seminar is being offered in two sections, one led by William Schweiker, Director of the Center; the other led by Malika Zeghal, Associate Professor of the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion and of Islamic Studies in the Divinity School.

The Senior Research Fellows and Junior Dissertation Fellows, listed below, will participate in the seminar, which is designed to advance interdisciplinary research in all areas of religious studies. Dissertation Fellows will be required to present their individual projects not only within the seminar, before their peers, but before public interlocutors at a special spring meeting. The seminar's goal is to advance scholarship mindful of the public setting of all inquiry. The spring meeting helps participants articulate their projects in ways that will be intelligible to specialists and non-specialists alike.

For more information on these fellowships, please visit http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/fellows/.

Senior Research Fellow Symposia

The Senior Fellow Symposium will allow a Senior Fellow to present her or his work in a public forum to members of the seminar, the entire Divinity School community and also members of the University and interested persons. Please save these dates: November 13 (C. Six); February 26 (V. Rougeau); April 16 (S. Macfarland). All symposia are Thursdays from 4:00-6:00 p.m. in the Common Room.

MARTY CENTER FELLOWS 2008-2009

Senior Research Fellows

Jiangyang Dong, a Visiting Research Scholar from China for the 2008-09 Fulbright Scholar Program, will pursue a research project entitled "A Study on the Relationship Between the Christian Church and the Government in the USA & its Potential Meanings Toward China." His project focuses on a comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of the historical, religious, political, philosophical and sociological dimensions of church-state relations.

Vincent Rougeau will be working on a project tentatively titled “Faith and Citizenship in the New Millennium: Christian witness in a pluralist society.” Rougeau is currently Associate Professor and Director of the Center on Law and Government at Notre Dame Law School; he recently completed a book with Oxford University Press entitled Christians in the American Empire: Fair and Citizenship in the New World Order.

Clemens Six will be working on a project tentatively titled “Modernity and Religion: The reception of Indian theories to rethink a historical relationship.” Six, who will be working with Martin Riesebrodt, Professor of the Sociology of Religion at the Divinity School, is a recent Ph.D. in South Asian Economic and Social History from the University of Vienna and recently authored Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan. Politik und Religion im modernen Indien.

Sarah McFarland Taylor will be working on two projects tentatively titled “Eternally Green: American religion and the ecology of death” and “Religious Responses to Global Climate Change.” Taylor is currently Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s Department of Religion, where she also teaches in the American Studies program and the Environmental Policy and Culture program. She published Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology with Harvard University Press in 2007 and has two book projects currently underway.

Associate

Wu Guo is a professor of the Institute of Religious Studies, Sichuan University. His field of specialty includes Taoism, especially two Taoist sects: Quan-zhen (perfect verity) and Jing-ming (purity and sunniness). He comes to the Marty Center from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, where he was working on a research project titled "Taoism in Modern Chinese Society and Trends of Contemporary Neo-Taoism."

Dissertation Fellows

Of our twelve dissertation (junior) fellows, seven are Divinity School students and five are extradepartmental.

The Divinity School fellows and their dissertations:

D. Maurice Charles, "Heresy, Treason, and Royal Prerogative: Henry VIII and the Plenitude of Power"

Carrie Dohe, "The Wandering Archetype: C.G. Jung's Wotan and the Coming Religion in Early Twentieth Century Pan-German Culture"

Cooper Harriss, "Ralph Ellison: Religion, Race and the Irony of African-American Literature"

Anne Knafl, "Forms of God, Forming God: A Typology of Divine Anthropomorphism in the Pentateuch"

Carlos Manrique, "Religion, Subjectivity and the Political in Derrida's reading of Kant"

Daniel Shin, "The Public Theology of Hans W. Frei: Hermeneutics, Christology, and Theological Ethics"

Sally Stamper, “Horror and Its Aftermaths: A Psychological Reading of Human Suffering from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Marilyn McCord Adams and Jonathan Lear”

The extradepartmental fellows:
Catherine Bronson, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, "The Eve of Islamic Exegesis"

Urmila Nair, Department of Anthropology, "When the sun's rays are as shadows: the Rituals of the Nechung Deity in Tibetan Exile"

Xiaoli Tian, Department of Sociology, "Relocating Science: Western medicine in 19th-century China"

Jeremy Walton, Department of Anthropology, "Constructing Civic Virtue in a Superior State: Islam and Civil Society in Contemporary Turkey"

Jennifer Westerfield, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, "In the Shadow of the Sphinx: Pharaonic Sacred Space in the Coptic Imagination"