Asad Q. Ahmed
Asad Q. Ahmed is associate professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Dept. of Near Eastern Studies. He specializes in pre-modern Islamic social and intellectual history.
Near Eastern Studies
Robert Alter
Robert Alter is currently Professor of the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature. He has done extensive work on literary aspects of the Hebrew Bible and has translated, with a commentary, about two-thirds of the Hebrew Bible. Alter has research and teaching interests in modern Hebrew literature and in the European and American novel.
Hebrew and Comparative Literature (Emeritus)
Diliana Angelova
Professor Angelova’s main research focus is Early Christian and Byzantine art. Her scholarship concerns the intersection of two basic issues: continuity and change in the realm of ideas, and the role of women in ancient societies.
History, Art History
Law
Mary Elizabeth Berry
Mary Elizabeth Berry is a specialist on premodern Japanese history. Her teaching includes attention to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto. Her current research on consumption in the seventeenth century explores the contemporary religious discourse in these traditions concerning wealth, poverty, and charity.
History
Benjamin Brinner
Ben Brinner, Faculty Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, is a professor in the Department of Music. Musical aspects of Muslim and Jewish religious beliefs and practices are central to his courses on music in the Middle East. He has conducted research in Indonesia and Israel since the 1980s. In addition to Playing Across a Divide: Israeli-Palestinian Musical Encounters, he has written two books on Javanese gamelan music and is currently finishing a third, dealing with expert memory for music.
Music
Daniel Boyarin
Daniel Boyarin is the Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, faculty in the departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric, Affiliated Member Department of Women’s Studies, Member of core faculty in the minor in Gay and Lesbian Studies and of the graduate group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, and the designated emphasis in Women, Sexuality, Gender Studies, as well as the core faculty of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. He was awarded with a Doctorate Degree in 1975 from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America upon completion of his dissertation on A Critical Edition of the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Nazir.
Lara Buchak
Lara Buchak is an associate professor of philosophy. Her primary interests are in decision and game theory, particularly in how an individual ought to take risk into account when making decisions; in philosophy of religion, particularly on the nature and rationality of faith; and in epistemology, particularly on the conditions under which one ought to stop looking for more evidence and make a commitment.
Philosophy
Carolyn Chen
Carolyn Chen received her doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2002. Prior to teaching at Berkeley, she was Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she served as Director of the Asian American Studies Program. She is author of the book 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). She is currently working on a book that examines the usage of Asian spiritual practices in Silicon Valley firms.
Ethnic Studies
John Connelly
Professor Connelly’s specialty is in twentieth century East Central Europe. His research interests include history of nationalism, socialism in the region, particularly intersections with ideology, including religious ideologies.
History
Mark Csikszentmihalyi
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.
East Asian Languages and Cultures
Jacob Dalton
Jacob Dalton is Associate Professor and Khyentse Chair in Tibetan Buddhism and works on Nyingma religious history, tantric ritual, early Tibetan paleography, and the Dunhuang manuscripts. He is the author of The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism (Yale University Press, 2011).
East Asian Languages and Culture
John Efron
John Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History in the Department of History and specializes in the cultural and social history of German Jewry. His work has focused on the German-Jewish engagement with medicine, anthropology, and antisemitism and he has written on subjects such as Jewish burial, circumcision, and dietary practices. His book Sephardic Beauty and the Ashkenazic Imagination: German Jewry in the Age of Emancipation, (2015) presents a study of modern German Jewry’s attraction to the aesthetics of medieval Sephardic Jewry.
History
Susanna Elm
Susanna Elm is Professor of History and Classics, with a specialization in the social and cultural history of the later Roman empire. Her current interests focus on the relation between slavery and theology, especially in the work of Augustine of Hippo. Her works include Virgins of God: the Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity, and Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome.
Victoria Frede
Victoria Frede, History Department, Russian intellectual history of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Research interests include the transferal of French and German philosophical ideas to Russia; atheism and heterodox religious thought in Russia; Orthodoxy; friendship in intellectual circles, behavioral norms, and political loyalties among the elites.
History
Erich Gruen
Erich Gruen, emeritus from three departments: History, Classics, and Jewish Studies, with special interests in ancient ethnicity, Hellenistic Judaism, and cultural interconnections in the ancient Mediterranean.
History, Classics, and Jewish Studies (Emeritus)
William Hanks
William Hanks is a linguistic anthropologist who works on the history of Catholic missions among Maya people of colonial Yucatan Mexico, the relation between religious conversion and translation, and modern Maya shamanism.
Anthropology
Ron Hassner
Ron Hassner is an associate professor of political science and co-director (with Steven Fish) of the Religion, Politics, and Globalization Program. His interests are international conflict, sacred space, religion in the military and religion in 20th-century contemporary warfare.
Political Science
Ron Hendel
Professor Hendel has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since 1999 and has served as chair of Jewish Studies, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Graduate Program in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. Hendel approaches the Hebrew Bible from a variety of angles – history of religions, textual criticism, linguistics, comparative mythology, literature, and cultural memory. He is the editor-in-chief of The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, a new critical edition of the Hebrew text, whose first volume (Proverbs, by Michael V. Fox) was published in 2015. He is also writing a new commentary on Genesis for the Yale Anchor Bible. In 1999, he received the Frank Moore Cross Publications Award from the American Schools of Oriental Research. His books include The Text of Genesis 1-11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition(Oxford, 1998), Remembering Abraham: Culture, History, and Memory in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford, 2005), Reading Genesis: Ten Methods (editor and contributor; Cambridge, 2010), The Book of Genesis: A Biography (Princeton, 2013), Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (SBL Press, 2016), and How Old is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (Yale University Press, 2018).
Near Eastern Studies
David A. Hollinger
David A. Hollinger, Professor Emeritus of History, has recently published three books about American Protestantism, After Cloven Tongues of Fire (Princeton, 2013), Protestants Abroad (Princeton, 2017), and When This Mask of Flesh is Broken (Outskirts, 2019). History (emeritus)..
History (Emeritus)
Steven Justice
Steven Justice is Professor of English. He works on a long stretch of writing in Christian latinity from late antiquity to the later middle ages.
English
Victoria Kahn
Victoria Kahn is Hotchkis Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature. She works on the literature and political theory of the early modern period, with a longstanding interest in political theology.
English, Comparative Literature
Abhishek Kaicker
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.
History
Ethan Katz
Ethan Katz is a historian of modern Europe and the Mediterranean, with specialties in modern Jewish history and the history of modern France and its empire. His publications include The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard University Press, 2015), Secularism in Question: Jews and Judaism in Modern Times (co-editor, with Ari Joskowicz; UPenn Press, 2015), Colonialism and the Jews (co-editor, with Lisa Moses Leff and Maud Mandel; Indiana University Press, 2017). His new new book project, tentatively titled Freeing the Empire: The Jewish Uprising That Helped the Allies Win the War, will chronicle the little-known story of an uprising in Algiers from 1940 to 1943 that proved vital to the success of Operation Torch.
History
Stanley A. Klein
Stanley A. Klein is a Professor of Vision Science and Optometry and a member of the Berkeley Visual Processing Laboratory.
Jeffrey Knapp
Jeffrey Knapp is the Ida Mae and William J. Eggers, Jr. Chair in English at Berkeley. His primary fields of study are Renaissance English literature and Twentieth-Century American Film. Religion has been a central topic in nearly every one of Knapp’s publications, including Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (University of Chicago Press, 2002), and “‘Sacred Songs, Popular Prices’: Secularization in The Jazz Singer” (Criticial Inquiry, 2008).
English
Henrike Christiane Lange
Henrike Christiane Lange is an historian of art and literature. Professor Lange’s interests focus on the visual and textual arts and languages in the Renaissance and on the historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Italian Studies, Art History
Thomas Laqueur
Thomas Laqueur has written about working class religion and cultural change during the English industrial revolution and about spiritualism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His forthcoming book on the work of the dead engages both local questions about churches and the care of the dead and the anthropology of religion in deep time.
History (Emeritus)
Margaret Larkin
Professor Larkin’s work is focused on Arabic literature, and in particular a subset of it that deals with the stylistic inimitability of the Qur’an (i’jaz al-Qur’an). Her first book (The Theology of Meaning: ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani’s Theory of Discourse) was on a major theorist in this field, ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078 or 1082), and she has taught seminars on i’jaz al-Qur’an a number of times. Larkin has also taught Introduction to Islam as the introductory course in the Religious Studies program here at Berkeley.
Near Eastern Studies
Rita Lucarelli
Rita Lucarelli is Assistant Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley and Fellow of the Digital Humanities in Berkeley. She is presently completing a monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt and she is one of the coordinators of the
Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project. Her research interests include religion, magic and science in ancient Egypt and in Antiquity, ancient Egyptian funerary literature, demonology in ancient Egypt and Antiquity, Digital Humanities and Egyptology.
Near Eastern Studies
Duncan MacRae
Professor MacRae Duncan 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.
Classics
Sara Magrin
Sara Magrin is an associate professor in the Department of Classics. She works on ancient philosophy, and particularly on Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic philosophy. Her primary interests lie at the intersection of epistemology and moral psychology. Her current research focuses on Plotinus’ account of human motivation and, more broadly, on ancient analyses of the distinction between rational and non-rational forms of cognition and desire.
Classics
Angela Marino
Ph.D., New York University. Research areas are: Performance and Political Theory; Fiesta and Carnival of Latin/o America; Popular Performance; Theater History; and Latin American Studies. Marino is co-editor of Festive Devils in the Americas in Richard Schechner’s Enactments Series (Seagull Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2015) and is published in the Latin American Theater Review (2008), Harvard Revista (2014), e-misférica Journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (2013) and Cultural Anthropology (2014). She is currently writing a book on Populism and Performance. Marino is also advisor to the Teatro at Cal project and coordinator of the Luis Valdez Regent’s Lectureship in 2014.
Christopher Ocker
Christopher Ocker is Professor of Church History at the San Francisco Theological Seminary. His monographs include Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation (Cambridge), Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany (Brill), and Johannes Klenkok: A Friar’s Life, c. 1310-1374 (American Philosophical Society) and most recently, Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (Cambridge). His many articles treat the history of biblical interpretation, the history of Jewish-Christian conflict, Reformation theology, and religious conflict in the Middle Ages. He was the coordinating editor of the two-volume Festschrift for Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Histories and Reformations (Brill), associate editor of the New Westminster Dictionary of Church History (Westminster John Knox), an editor of The Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, and a member of the editorial boards of the series Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions (Brill) and The Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Professor Ocker is on leave 2019-21.
Christine Philliou
Christine Philliou, associate professor, specializes in the political and social history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and Greece as parts of the post-Ottoman world. Her book, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011) examines the changes in Ottoman governance leading up to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. It does so using the vantage point of Phanariots, an Orthodox Christian elite that was intimately involved in the day-to-day work of governance even though structurally excluded from the Ottoman state. Her current work turns to the political, personal and intellectual/artistic itinerary of the Turkish writer Refik Halit Karay (1888-1965). Her interests and other publications have had to do with comparative empires across Eurasia, various levels of transitions from an “Ottoman” to a “post-Ottoman” world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and political and cultural interfaces in the eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and Balkans in the early modern and modern eras. This fall she is teaching a seminar on the post-Ottoman World, and next semester a graduate seminar on comparative empires, “The Ottoman Empire and its Rivals.”
Diego Pirillo
Diego Pirillo (Ph.D., Scuola Normale Superiore) is Associate Professor of Italian Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Center for the Study of Religion, the Institute of European Studies, the Program in Critical Theory, and in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies.He specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, with an emphasis on Italy, England and early America. His research interests include religious studies, the history of books and readers, the history of diplomacy and international relations, and the history of scholarship and historiography.He has been a fellow at Villa I Tatti (the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), and his work has been supported by many institutions (The John Carter Brown Library, The Hellman Foundation, The UC Berkeley Institute of International Studies, the Newberry Library, The Rare Book School at UVA, and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, among others).Along with several articles and book chapters, he is the author of Filosofia ed eresia nell’Inghilterra del tardo Cinquecento: Bruno, Sidney e i dissidenti religiosi italiani (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010) and (with O. Catanorchi) of Favole, metafore, storie. Seminario su Giordano Bruno (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007).His latest book The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) .
Italian Studies
Alexander von Rospatt
Alexander von Rospatt is Professor for Buddhist and South Asian Studies, and director of the Group in Buddhist Studies. He specializes in the doctrinal history of Indian Buddhism, and in Newar Buddhism, the only Indic Mahayana tradition that continues to persist in its original South Asian setting (in the Kathmandu Valley) right to the present. His first book sets forth the development and early history of the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness. His new book “The Svayambhu Caitya and its Renovations” deals with the historical renovations of the Svayambhū Stupa of Kathmandu. Based on Newar manuscripts and several years of fieldwork in Nepal, he reconstructs the ritual history of these renovations and their social contexts. This book complements numerous essays Prof. von Rospatt has authored on various aspects of this tradition, including its narrative literature, and its rituals and their origins and evolution. He currently has two related monographs under preparation, one dealing with the mural paintings and other visual depictions of the Svayambhupurana, the other with the life-cycle rituals of old age as observed among Newars and other South Asian communities.
Ethan Shagan
Ethan Shagan is an historian of early modern Britain in particular and early modern Europe more generally. His work most often focuses on the interpenetration of religion and politics, and more broadly the contested space of religion in the early modern world. His most recent book, The Rule of Moderation (Cambridge, 2011), explored how and why the ubiquitous discourse of moderation, the golden mean, and the religious via media in early modern England functioned as an ideology of control and a tool of social, religious, and political power. In his current project, entitled The Problem of Belief in Early Modern Europe, he is exploring how the Reformations of the sixteenth century threw the category of “belief” into crisis, changing its meanings and forcing it to bear extraordinary new weight under which it eventually collapsed. This attention to the category rather than the content of belief, and his claim that belief was a problem rather than a stable backdrop against which other problems occurred, challenges the framework with which scholars have considered the emergence of “unbelief” while at the same time challenging any attempt to imagine “belief” in the past as an irreducible constant or a motor of historical change.
Robert Sharf
Robert Sharf is D. H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a B.A. in Religious Studies (1979) and an M.A. in Chinese Studies (1981) from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Michigan (1990). His graduate work included study in Japan; he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Research into the Humanities (Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo) at Kyoto University, and also conducted fieldwork at Kōfukuji in Nara (1985-87). He works primarily in the area of medieval Chinese Buddhism (especially Chan), but he also dabbles in Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art, ritual studies, and methodological issues in the study of religion.
Francesco Spagnolo
Francesco Spagnolo, a multidisciplinary scholar focusing on Jewish studies, music and digital media, is the Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and a Lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a host for the cultural programs of Italian National Radio (RAI) in Rome. His research interests include the study of liturgy (texts, sounds, music, architecture, material culture, body language) and synagogue life in the global Jewish Diaspora, with a particular focus on Italy and the Mediterranean since the early-modern period; the emergence of Jewish musical revival movements in Europe since the 19th century; and music in Israel.
Music
Yuri Slezkine
Yuri Slezkine works in Russian history, with an interest in Soviet millenarianism.
History (Emeritus)
Ann Swidler
Professor Swidler works in Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Religion, Political Sociology, and Global and Transnational Sociology. Her research has focused on American religion (co-author, Habits of the Heart) and on religion and chieftaincy in Malawi. She is currently engaged in a project examining how Christian and Muslim congregations in Malawi link villagers to wider social and sacred realities. Her work examines what services congregations provide, how Malawians understand the theological and practical offerings of different religious traditions, and why Malawians switch congregations, denominations, and even faith traditions with some frequency.
Sociology
Ivonne del Valle
Ivonne del Valle is Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Associate Professor of Colonial Studies. Her research and teaching make connections between the past and the present which try to show the relevance of the colonial period for an understanding of contemporary times. She was co-director of the Berkeley research group “Mexico and the Rule of Law.” She has written a book and a series of articles on the Jesuits (José de Acosta and Loyola, and Jesuits in the northern borderlands of New Spain) as a particularly influential politico-religious order that served modernization and the expansion of the Spanish empire. She is currently working on two projects: one on the drainage of the lakes of Mexico City, and the other on the role of the colonization of Spanish America from the 15th century onward in the development of new epistemologies and political theories. In the latter she is exploring the ways in which both the unprecedented violence of conquest and colonization, and the need for effective administration of the colonies, brought about important theoretical, technological, and epistemological changes which may have been conceived to be put in place in the colonies, but which in the long run transformed the way Europe understood and fashioned itself.
Spanish and Portuguese
Niek Veldhuis
Niek Veldhuis, Professor of Assyriology, Department of Near Eastern Studies. Director of the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts (
http://oracc.org/dcclt). Main research interests: literature, scholarship and religions of ancient Mesopotamia.
Near Eastern Studies