People

Carolyn Chenis Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is author of Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience(Princeton 2008) and co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (NYU 2012). Her new book, Work Pray Code: When Work Replaces Religion in Silicon Valley, is about the transformation in work, religion, and community in late capitalist America. It will be published this spring by Princeton University Press. 

Professor MacRae studies the religious history of the Roman world, particularly in the late Republican and early imperial periods. He has published on the traditional pagan religions of antiquity as well as on Judaism and early Christianity. His first book, Legible Religion, (Harvard University Press, 2016) argues that learned books that were written in the first century BCE by intellectuals like Varro, Cicero, Nigidius Figulus and a cast of Roman elites played an important role in the formation of the concept of “Roman religion”, particularly in the eyes of influential readers like the emperor Augustus and the bishop Augustine.

Robert Braun combines archival work with geographical information systems to study civil society and intergroup relationships in times of social upheaval. He has recently finished a book, Protectors of Pluralism: the Collective Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, on the protection of Jews during the Holocaust in the Low Countries (forthcoming at Cambridge University Press). His new research project studies the political causes and consequences of anti-Semitism by exploring racial themes in German children’s stories. In the past he has worked on the geographical spread of different types of political violence such as terrorism, anti-immigrant attacks, and soccer hooliganism.

Mark Csikszentmihalyi writes on pre-modern Chinese thought, and is author of Material Virtue: Ethics and the Body in Early China and Readings in Han Chinese Thought. He began his career in the Department of Religion at Davidson College, and is editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions, former Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and was a contributing editor for the Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edition. At Berkeley, he teaches Confucianism and Daoism in the context of early Chinese society, chairs the department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and co-founded the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.

Charles Hirschkind is faculty in the department of Anthropology. His research interests concern religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East, North America, and Europe. He gives particular attention to diverse configurations of the human sensorium, and the histories, ethics, and politics they make possible. His latest book, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in late 2020.

Abhishek Kaicker is a historian of South Asia and Assistant Professor in the History Department. He is interested in questions of politics, culture, and the city in the Mughal empire and the early modern world more broadly.

Niklaus Largier is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of German and Comparative Literature. He is affiliated with UC Berkeley’s Programs in Medieval Studies and Religious Studies, the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and the Berkeley Center for New Media. Largier is currently working on two projects: a book on imagination, practices of figuration, aesthetic experience, and notions of possibility, tentatively entitled “Figures of Possibility;” and a book on the history of practices and the poetics of prayer (with David Marno).

David Marno’s work concentrates on the intersection between literature and religious practice, in particular on the relationship between prayer, meditation, spiritual exercises and poetry. He has published on religious and secular concepts of attention, on apocalypse as a literary and political figure, and on philosophy of history and comparative literature. His first book, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention (Chicago, 2016), reads John Donne’s Holy Sonnets as a site where the bonds between premodern devotional, literary, and philosophical investments in attentiveness become visible. The question of when and why prayer requires attentiveness has led to Marno’s current project, which focuses on prayer in the aftermath of the Reformation.

Stefania Pandolfo studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world, investigating narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness and mental illness. Her current project is a study of emergent forms of subjectivity in Moroccan modernity at the interface of “traditional therapies” and psychiatry/psychoanalysis, exploring theoretical ways to think existence, possibility and creation in a context of referential and institutional instability and in the aftermath of trauma, based on ethnographic research on spirit possession and the “cures of the jinn”, and on the experience of madness in a psychiatric hospital setting.

Jonathan Sheehan is an historian of early modern European religion, science, scholarship, and philosophy. He is the author of The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005), and, with Dror Wahrman, of Invisible Hands: Self-Organization in the Eighteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2015). His articles on secularism, Enlightenment, and early modern religious culture have appeared in Past & Present, the American Historical Review, the Journal for the History of Ideas, and Representations.

Ronit Y. Stahl is a historian of modern America. Her work focuses on pluralism in American society by examining how politics, law, and religion interact in spaces such as the military and medicine. Her book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2017), traces the uneven processes through which the military struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism in the twentieth century. Her current research examines the rise of institutional and corporate rights of consience in health care. This project weaves together the court decisions, legislation, medical and bioethical arguments, religious ideas, and lived experiences that shaped the disparate trajectories of reproductive healthcare, LGBT healthcare, and end-of-life care from the 1970s to the present.

Patty Dunlap is the Program and Grants Coordinator for the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry. She previously served in Corporate and Foundation Relations on campus, and worked in the pharmaceutical industry for nearly two decades prior. Patty graduated from UC Irvine with a BA and MBA in Psychology, and now lives with her husband, dog, and four children.

Dr. David Kyuman Kim is Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion at the University of California, Berkeley and Founder of Radical Love Productions, a media and consultancy company dedicated to creating content that speaks to the most important moral issues about what it means to be human, specifically around questions of race, democracy, and justice. Most recently he served as Executive Director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. For nearly twenty years, Dr. Kim was Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at Connecticut College, where he founded the first center on race and ethnicity at a liberal arts college. He has held appointments at Brown, Stanford, UPenn, Union Theological Seminary, the Graduate Theological Union, UC Berkeley School of Law, and the Social Science Research Council, where he served as a Senior Advisor and Editor-at-Large of The Immanent Frame, the SSRC’s online platform on secularism, religion and public life. Author of Melancholic Freedom: Agency and the Spirit of Politics (Oxford 2007) and co-editor of The Postsecular in Question and Race, Religion, and Late Democracy, he is widely published in the fields of religious studies, Asian American studies, poltical theory, and race and democracy. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Truthout, and The Immanent Frame. His podcast and book The Public Life of Love are in development. A food and wine enthusiast and classically-trained musician, he lives in Oakland, CA.

Valentina Napolitano is Professor of Anthropology, a Connaught Scholar and a former Director of the Latin American Studies program at the University of Toronto. She works on Critical Catholic Studies as well as on anthropology of affects, borderlands and migration, and has a particular interest in political theology, affective histories, anthropology of traces, mysticism and politics, and the work of Michel de Certeau. She is a co-recipient (with S. Coleman) of a Connaught Global Challenge Award for a project on Entangled Worlds: Sovereignty, Sanctities and Soil and the author of two ethnographic monographs: Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return: Transnationalism and the Roman Catholic Church (FUP, 2016, Finalist Geertz Prize of the Society for Anthropology of Religion) and Migration, Mujercitas and Medicine Men: Living in Urban Mexico (UCP, 2002). She is also the co-editor (with K. Norget and M. Mayblin) of The Anthropology of Catholicism: a Reader (UCP, 2017), and has authored many articles and special issues including with C. McAllister Theopolitics in/of the Americas (Social Analysis, 2020).

Anna Hennessey is a San Francisco author and scholar whose work explores the religious, artistic, and philosophical dimensions of birth. Her recent book, Imagery, Ritual, and Birth: Ontology Between the Sacred and the Secular(Rowman & Littlefield, 2018) explores ways in which religious imagery is secularized and re-sacralized during the contemporary rituals of birth. Anna’s work is highly interdisciplinary; she has a PhD in the History of Chinese Religions from UC Santa Barbara, an MA in Art History from UC Santa Barbara, and a BA with a double major in Philosophy and Romance Language from New York University. She is currently working on three projects. The first is a book project that considers a wide range of artworks used within various birth communities to visualize the process of birth as both a physiological and sacred event. The second is a community project in San Francisco developed over the past two years and devoted to the creation of a Birth Circle for low-income women, and especially low-income women of color who live in public housing. As part of the project, Anna is collecting birth stories and creating a web archive of these histories. The third, also a book project, takes a broad look at how art about birth and genesis interact or influence cultural or national identities. She is especially interested in this topic as it relates to Catalan art and representations of rebirth in the wake of cultural turmoil.

Udi Greenberg studies and teaches modern European history, intellectual history, and international history. His scholarship and teaching focus especially on the intersection of ideas, institution building, and Europe’s interactions with the world. His work has been supported, among others, by the ACLS, Mellon Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the DAAD.

His first book, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2015), traces the intellectual, institutional, and political journey of five influential political theorists from their education in Weimar Germany to their participation in the formation of the Cold War. It argues that both Germany’s postwar democratization, and the German-American alliance, were deeply shaped by these émigrés’ attempts to revive intellectual, religious, and political projects first developed in Weimar Germany. In 2016, it was awarded the Council of European Studies’ Book Prize (for best first book in European studies 2014-2015). It also appeared in German, Korean, and Hebrew translations.

He is currently working on a second book-length project, tentatively titled Religious Pluralism in the Age of Violence: Catholics and Protestants from Animosity to Peace 1885-1965. This project explores the intersections between twentieth-century religious thought and global politics. It investigates how transformations in global politics–the rise of Nazism, the unfolding of the Cold War, and the the process of European decolonization in Asia and Africa–helped fascilitate the end of the prolonged religious animosities between Protestants and Catholics.

His articles (mostly related to these two book projects) have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Historical Review, Journal of Modern History, Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and Journal of Contemproary History, among others. He has also published several essays on politics, religion, and history in The Nation, Dissent, Boston Review, L.A. Review of Books, n+1 and elsewhere.

Sarah Bakker Kellogg (Ph.D. University of California, Santa Cruz, 2013) is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersection of religion, politics, and the performing arts. Using the methodological tools of sound studies and the anthropology of voice, she conducts on-going ethnographic fieldwork among Middle Eastern Christian refugees and immigrants who have settled in the Netherlands. This research has yielded several distinct projects, on which she has presented and published widely. These projects include investigations into Dutch secularism’s roots in anti-Enlightenment theocracy; racialization as the ethics and aesthetics of religious difference in Europe; gender, kinship, and ethics in the Syriac liturgical tradition; the secular construction of the category “ethnicity,” and the politics of intra-Christian and inter-faith activism globally. She has previously taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of California, Santa Cruz and at San Francisco State University. During the 2017-2018 academic year, she will be completing her book manuscript, Liturgical Song in an Age of Political Calamity: Registers of Recognition in the Syriac Christian Diaspora, with funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship. Representative publications can be found here. link: https://berkeley.academia.edu/SarahBakkerKellogg

Andrea Vestrucci (Ph.D., University of Milan; Ph.D., University of Lille) has served as Professor at the Federal University in Fortaleza, Brazil; Australia Award fellow of Monash University; and researcher of the University of Milan. Currently a member of the Eric Weil Institute in Lille, he has recently completed a major research project in systematic theology for the University of Geneva.

His scientific commitment embraces both philosophical and theological speculations.

Concerning philosophy, he is a scholar of Kant and Neo-Kantianism (H. Cohen, E. Weil), and of the Hungarian Kreis called “Budapest School” (G. Lukács, A. Heller, F. Fehér, G. Markus). His philosophical research focuses on transcendental logic, meta-ethics, the ethics-aesthetics relationship, and philosophy of right.

Jason S. Sexton is a BCSR visiting fellow through June 2018. He has taught at Cal State Fullerton for the last three years, where he is the Pollak Library Faculty Fellow and edits the UC Press-published, Boom California. He holds the Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews, and has written widely in the areas of California studies, prison studies, religious studies, and contemporary theology. He has written The Trinitarian Theology of Stanley J. Grenz (Bloomsbury) and edited Theology and California: Theological Refractions on California’s Culture (Routledge). He is currently writing a book that gives an interdisciplinary theological account of the incarcerated church.

I took a degree in Law (1999) and in History (2003) and I completed my PhD in Early Modern History (2006) at the University of Trieste. I have held fellowships from Alpen-Adria Universität (Klagenfurt 2006), Karl-Franzens Universität (Graz 2007), Max Planck Institute for Legal History (Frankfurt am Main 2013) and I have been visiting Scholar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris 2016). Since 2008 (2011 full-time) I am researcher at the Bruno Kessler Foundation, Italian German Historical Institute. As adjunct professor, I teach a course in in History of Historiography at the University of Trent (2014 Atlantic History, 2015 Food History).

My broad areas of research are religious history in the early modern age, Jesuit studies and food history.

Steven Barrie-Anthony (PhD, PsyD) is a 2021–2027 BCSR Research Associate.

Barrie-Anthony is a scholar of religion and a research psychoanalyst with a clinical practice in the Bay Area. He holds doctorates in Religious Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara), and in Psychoanalysis (Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis). Barrie-Anthony’s research approach brings together contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice with religion scholarship. He is particularly interested in exploring emerging social and civic groups among the religiously non-affiliated and the “spiritual but not religious.” 

Barrie-Anthony is the founding Director of Public Theologies of Technology and Presence, a multidisciplinary research initiative examining the impacts of technologies on human relationships. The initiative is based at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley and funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Barrie-Anthony’s  work examines the way technologies are shifting how humans relate to each other—what it means to be human and to be present with others—and how religion is ideally suited to help us understand and navigate these shifts.