Graduate Students
Andrea Allgood Smith
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Gail E. Armstrong
Early Christianity
B.A. The Pennsylvania State University; M.A. New York University
Interests include social history of earliest Christianity, Judaism and the religions of the Greco-Roman world with an emphasis on issues relating to women and gender and group/self identity. She is also interested in methods and theories in the study of religion. Exams taken: Christianity in the Early Empire: Paul, Women, and Gender; Christianity in Late Antiquity: Heresy and Asceticism. Her dissertation, which focuses on The Acts of Philip, is "under construction."
Debra Scoggins Ballentine
Ancient Judaism
B.A. and M.A. The University of Georgia
Interests include the Hebrew Bible in its Ancient West Asian context, NW Semitic languages and comparative historical grammar, ancient Canaanite and Mesopotamian religions, and the use of mythological topoi throughout the biblical anthology. Debra recently completed her dissertation, titled "You Divided Sea by Your Might": The "Conflict Myth" and the Biblical Tradition."
Anna Bialek 
Religion and Critical Thought
Anna entered the Religion and Critical Thought program in 2009 after graduating with an A.B. (summa cum laude) in Religion from Princeton University. She is interested in practices of valuing and perceiving value in relations of love, care, protection, and the recognition of fragility. Her current work focuses on love and vulnerability in Christian ethics, analytic philosophy, and feminist ethics, examining the construal and misconstrual of value in these discussions and its ethical and political significance. More broadly, her interests include contemporary religious ethics, modern Western religious thought, feminist ethics, moral psychology, and philosophies of beauty. Anna is a recipient of the Chancellor Thomas A. Tisch Fellowship for Graduate Studies.
Elizabeth Cecil
Asian Religious Traditions
Niki Clements
Religion and Critical Thought
BA, Sarah Lawrence College, MTS, Harvard Divinity School. Interests include conceptions of ethics and the human person, notably how the "self" has been conceived in both modern philosophical, critical discourses and Christian texts of late antiquity. Her research focuses on formulations of ethical agency, including embodied practices and affectively-motivated judgements. She is also investigating how contributions from neuroscience, moral psychology, and social-scientific theory can compliment philosophical and religious understandings of the human person.
Chandler (James) Coggins
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Larson DiFiori
Asian Religious Traditions
Laura Dingeldein
Early Christianity
Laura received a B.A. in Religious Studies and Graphic Design from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006 and graduated with an M.A. in Religion from Duke University in 2008. her primary interest is the contextualization for Paul and his epistles within the Greco-Roman cultural framework of which Paul is a part, with particular emphasis on Paul's use of post-Hellenistic philosophical concepts. Her dissertation examines Pauline religious hierarchy in 1 Corinthians 2:6-3:4. She hopes to reclaim the hierachial concepts of 1 Cor (such as pneumatikos,psychikos,teleios and nepios) as part and parcel of Paul's own thought, not that of his Corinthian audience. In doing so, she will examine Paul's reliance upon ideas of moral progression and religious hierarchy in his letters, as well as his use of concepts from post-Hellenistic moral philosophy. The dissertation will end with an examination of later Christians' interpretations of Paul's hierarchial terms.
In addition to her study of the Pauline epistles and Hellensitic moral philosophy, Laura'sbroad research interests inlcude issues of gender and sexuality in the Greco-Roman world (particulary in the canonical and non-canonical gospels), modern historiographical theory and methodology, Neoplatonic theurgy and its relationship to the "material turn" of the fourth centruy, CE, and the late antique reception of Paul.
Matthew L. Duperon
Religion and Critical Thought
BA in Religion, The College of William & Mary; MA in Asian Studies, Cornell University. Matt is a doctoral candidate in Religion and Critical Thought (RCT), working on early Chinese religion and comparative religious ethics. His dissertation, "'The Way Comes about as We Walk It': The Huainanzi and Early Daoist Ethics," is the first full-length study in a Western language of the moral philosophy in the second-century BCE text Huainanzi. He approaches the Huainanzi using theoretical resources drawn from American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey to both illuminate key areas of thought in the text, as well as to allow the text to critically engage contemporary ethical issues surrounding the place of embodied skills and habits in the moral life. Matt also has tangential interests in Chinese and Western alchemy, and the uniquely modern self-cultivation phenomenon of self-help literature. His teaching interests include Daoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, theory and method in the study of religion, American Pragmatism, and comparative religious ethics. Matthew has recently accepted a position in the Philosophy and Religion department at Susquehanna University.
Jennifer Eyl
Early Christianity
Jennifer did her BA and Post-Bac/Masters work in Classics. Her interests include: Paul and social formation, gender and sexuality in antiquity, ancient philosophy (esp. Stoicism, Cynicism, and Epicureanism), apocryphal Acts and Second Sophistic novels, translation theory, and cognitive approaches to religion. Her dissertation examines the apostle Paul in light of ancient divination specialists and wonder-workers.
Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos
Early Christianity
Rebecca is a third year student in the Early Christianity program. She graduated from Creighton University in 2002, with a Classical B.A. and a double major in Theology and Greek. She earned her Master of Arts in Early Christian Studies from the University of Notre Dame in 2005. During the summer of 2010, she attended the Summer School in Byzantine Grek at Dumbarton Oaks. Rebecca's primary field is Christianity in Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium, and her research focuses on the formulation of Christian identity and contestations over cultural hegemony in the Eastern Empire. She is particularly interested in issues of religious diveristy in Late Antiquity and strategies used in the promulgation of a normative Christian cultural identity, including homiletics, hymnography, architectural programs, and liturgical movement. She is also interested in the role of memory and topography in the creation of Christian landscapes.
Paul J. Firenze
Religion and Critical Thought
Paul received a B.A. in English from the University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in English from Mississippi State University with a focus on the literature of the American South, and an M.A. from the University fo Chicago Divinity School with an emphasis in the History of Christianity. At Brown, he works in the Religion and Critical Thought Program, studying ethics, philosophy of religion, theories of religion, and religion and economics. Paul served as a teaching assistant for courses in Religious Studies (Sexual Ethics, Love: the Concept and Practice, and Sacred Stories), Judaic Studies (History of the Holocaust), and the Cogut Center for the Humanities (Ethics and the Humanities and Making Choices: Ethics at the Frontier of Global Science). He is currently working on a dissertation titled " Value and the Economics of Religious Capital." He is also currently an Adjunct Lecturer in Philosophy and the Core Curriculum at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts.
Nicholas Aaron Friesner
Religion and Critical Thought
B.A., Philosophy, Brown University; M.A.R., Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology, Yale Divinity School. Primary area of interest is the epistemology of religious belief, the construction of the subject/knower in the late modern and contemporary West, and the role that religion has played in this construction. Specific interests include modern theological and philosophical anthropologies, the relationship between skepticism and reason in modern philosophical theology, theories of religion, the historical emergence of the religion/secularity binary, and American pragmatism and religion. Additionally interested in the recovery of the theological element in the history of philosophy as a way to understand the major themes of modernity and postmodernity.
Aaron Glaim
Ancient Judaism
Research interests include Judean religion and ethnicity in the Second Temple period; sacrifice; temples; theorizing religion and religious specialists; and contemporary Chinese religion in Indonesia.
Omar Haque 
Religion and Critical Thought
Interests include: religious experience/mysticism, cognitive and evolutionary approaches to religion and anthropology, method and theory in the study of religion, islamic philosophy and theology, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, personal identity, neuroethics, ethics at the end of life, cognitive neuroscience, Darwinian medicine, science and religion"
Alissa A. MacMillan
Religion and Critical Thought
B.A., Yale University, M.A., Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University. Alissa is completing her dissertation, "'There goes HOBBS, the Atheist! On Hobbes on Religion." Her primary areas of research interest are religion in the early modern period, with a focus on Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza, Kant, pragmatism, naturalism, and theory of religion.
Megan K. McBride
Religion and Critical Thought
Megan received a B.A. in Psychology from Drew University in 2000 and an M.A. in Liberal Arts from the Great Books program at St. John's College in 2004. At St. John's College her thesis explored the concepts of freedom, morality, and civil government in the work of Immanuel Kant. She went back to school after a short break, and completed an M.A. in Government from Johns Hopkins University in 2010. At JHU her thesis focused on the psychology of terrorism and proposed a new construct for understanding the role that ideology plays in motivating terrorist violence. Megan is interested in the relationship between religion and violence, the psychology and cognitive science of religion, the use of religious themes in sanctioning the non-normative morality of terrorist movements, just war theory, the perceived dichotomy of reason and revelation, and the relationship between religion and science.
Lori McCullough Veilleux
Religion, Culture, and Comparison
B.A. Hendrix College; M.A. Vanderbilt University
Lori studies religion and disaster through an interdisciplinary perspective. She recently completed a fellowship with the Massachusetts Historical Society where she did research on religious interpretations of cholera epidemics that threatened Boston in the 19th century. Other academic interests include practice theory, the anthropology of religion, and the cognitive science of religion. This summer, Lori will teach a course on religion and the U.S. Supreme Court, which introduces students to the religion clauses of the First Amendment through an exploration of cases on religion and public schooling. She enjoys playing games of intellect and chance, sewing, and sitting in the "religious studies booth" at the local student pub on Friday evenings.
John Parrish
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Daniel Picus
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
B.A. Classics, Macalester College; M.St. Jewish Studies in the Greco-Roman Period, University of Oxford (Wolfson College). Primary interests include the construction of holiness in late antique Judaism and Christianity, and how it interacts (mostly in literature) with other constructions like gender, sexuality, or martyrdom. I am also interested more broadly in the idea of sacred text and how it is conceived as sacred, especially as regards to Rabbinic literature. Other interests include biblical, classical, and postclassical poetry (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), translation and translation theory, and the use of wordplay in religious literature.
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
B.A. Classics, Macalester College; M.St. Jewish Studies in the Greco-Roman Period, University of Oxford (Wolfson College).
Primary interests include the construction of holiness in late antique Judaism and Christianity, and how it interacts (mostly in literature) with other constructions like gender, sexuality, or martyrdom. I am also interested more broadly in the idea of sacred text and how it is conceived as sacred, especially as regards Rabbinic literature. Other interests include biblical, classical, and postclassical poetry (Latin, Greek, and Hebrew), translation and translation theory, and the use of wordplay in religious literature.
Brian Rainey
Religion Comparison and Culture
2004 B.A. Brown University (Ancient Studies), 2007 M.Div. Harvard Divinity School
Brian is interested in questions of power, representation and interpretation in Ancient Israel. He hopes to draw from a wide variety of theoretical traditions in the study of the Hebrew Bible, including psychoanalysis, the hermeneutic tradition, and sociology. His areas of inquiry include: conflicts between reformers and traditionalists in ancient Israelite religion, conceptualizations of grief, tragedy and horror in the biblical and Ancient Near Eastern world, and the politics of biblical interpretation.
Paul M. Robertson
Early Christianity
BA Classics/Religion Reed College 2006, senior thesis translation and commentary of unpublished fragment of Didymus the Blind's commentary on Romans. Main fields of graduate study: Hellenistic philosophy, particularly early Stoicism and Cynicism; New Testament, with emphasis on Paul's letters; early Syriac literature; late antique studies, encompassing social history and the writings of the Patristics, in particular Gregory Nazianzus; later Greek and Byzantine studies, especially paleography. Exams: survey of ancient Judaism; Greek and Roman philosophy; early Christian ritual and modern ritual theory; education in the ancient Mediterranean and classical thought in the Patristics; language and rhetoric in Paul's letters. Dissertation under Stanley Stowers: theorizing new literary typologies for first century CE Greco-Roman literature, specifically with an aim to comparing Paul's writings with the writings of contemporary moral-paraenetic and professional prose writers.
Miguel A. Segovia
Contemporary Religious Thought
M.A. Boston College ; M.Div. Harvard. Areas of interest include the history of political theory, feminist social criticism, and ethics; comparative philosophies of liberation; theories of religion, culture, and ritual; the moral psychology of fiction and realism in the novel; nineteenth and twentieth century Continental philosophy, especially conceptions of "the subject," inter-subjectivity, and agency; African American and Chicana/o fiction, history, and literary criticism; phenomenology of gender and race; recent interventions in queer theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial feminisms. Exams: "Philosophy of the Subject: Critical Perspectives on Agency, Power, and the Politics of Experience"; "Political Philosophy: Democracy and Difference"; "Moral Philosophy and Christian Ethics: Love, Justice, and the Ethics of Care"; "Modern Christian Thought: Praxis and Identity in Liberation Philosophies and Political Theologies." His dissertation will explore literary theory, especially narrative theory, and theories of social criticism and will wrestle with self/other relations vis-à-vis questions about the nature of love and social justice and the ethico-political value of the imagination, knowledge, moral understanding, and the emotions in literatures of the Americas.
Jennifer E. Singletary
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
B.A. Boston University; M.A. The Pennsylvania State University; M.A. Brown University Interests include Ancient Mesopotamian and Ancient Israelite historiography, geography and ethnography, Semitic philology, Greek historiography, and literary theory.
Kerry Sonia
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Kerry is a second year in the RAM program, focusing on the culture and religion of ancient Israel within the broader context of ancient West Asian societies. She received an A.B. in Religious Studies from Brown (2007) and an M.T.S. in Hebrew Bible from Harvard Divinity School (2009). Her research interests include text-critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible, comparative Semitic philology, ancient historiography, and reconstructions of Israelite household religion, particularly the concept of Israelite family, its role in society, and the ritual practices involved in ancestor veneration. Her past research has addressed the intersection of this ritualized veneration and the construction of social hierarchies. Future research will further address theories of cultural memory as well as the role of ritual and the written word in the preservation of these cultural narratives.
Jonathan Sozek
Religion and Critical Thought
Jon received a B.A. in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College in 2003, then went on to complete an M.A. (honours) in religious studies at McGill University in 2006 with a thesis on Richard Rorty's and Charles Taylor's critiques of modern epistemology, focusing on the relation between these critiques and Rorty's and Taylor's very different attitudes toward religion. After working for several years in secondary education, Jon moved to Belgium to complete a second B.A. (2009) and M.A. (2010) in philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His thesis in Leuven examined the recenlty published correspondence between Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt in light of their differing conceptions of secularization and of the political function of myth in the modern period. Jon's ongoing research interests include the conceptual histories of 'religion' and 'the secular' and of their relation, modern theories of myth and the politics of mythmaking (as in Sorel, Cassirer, Blumenberg), political theology (as in Schmitt, Milibank, Kahn) and critical theory (Benjamin, Agamben).
Andrew Tobolowsky
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Andrew received a B.A. from Brown University in Religious Studies in 2007, an M.Phil in Literature from Trinity College, Dublin in 2008, and an M.A. in Religious Studies from Brown in 2010. He has excavated at Ramat Rahel and Khirbet el-Ras, the latter within lion-roaring distance of the Jerusalem Zoo. His research interests center around interactions in the Mediterranean between Levantine and Greek civilization from around 1200 BCE to around 500 BCE. He is especially interested in the interaction between narrative and geography, and the porous nature of borders with respect to myths and ideas. He has recently begun learning abour cultural geography, and about folklore, both of which he imagines will be fruitful directions for research. He is from Dallas, Texas, a place whose weather he misses very badly some days.
Josh K. Vaillancourt
Religion and Critical Thought
Prior to studying at Brown (and obtaining an M.A. in Religious Studies, 2008), Josh received a B.A. (Summa Cum Laude; honors) in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Saint Michael's College in 2004. His scholarly interests lie in theory and philosophy of religion, issues revolving around science and religion, and moral psychology. Josh's dissertation delves into the cognitive and psychological foundation of doubts and denials of naturalistic, biological evolutionary explanations, with particular attention to the interaction of cognition with religion and culture. In addition to his research, Josh taught a course in the fall of 2010, "Science and Religion," as Brown/Wheaton Faculty Fellow at nearby Wheaton College.
Robyn F. Walsh
Early Christianity
Robyn received a B.A. (summa cum ladue, Phi Beta Kappa, Class Valedictorian) in Ancient Studies (Religions Studies and Classics) from Wheaton College (Norton, MA) in 2002, and an M.Div. (Early Christianity) from Harvard in 2005. At Brown, she is in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean (RAM) program, specializing in Early Christianity, ancient Judaism, and Roman archaeology. Currently, she is writing her dissertation, "The Beginnings of Gospel Literature," which reexamines the social context of the composition and development of the Synoptic gospels and Q. Robyn's research interests also include Paul, Philo, Greek novels and archaeology of the Jewish Diaspora, as well as questions of theory and method in the academic study of religion. She has previously conducted research and fieldwork in Greece, Italy, Turkey, Israel, Bhutan, India, and Spain. In Spring, 2012, Robyn joined the faculty at the College of the Holy Cross as a visiting lecturer.
Heidi K. Wendt
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Heidi Wendt received a B.A. (magna cum laude) in Religious Studies and International Relations (2004) from Brown University and an M.T.S. in Religious Studies (2007) from Harvard Divinity School. She specializes in Roman religion and earliest Christianity and has also received extensive training in Classics and Roman Archaeology. Her interdisciplinary training includes participation in archaeology programs and excavations in Italy, Greece, and Turkey, as well as managing two digital humanities projects, the New Testament and Archaeological Slide Collection (Harvard) and the U.S. Epigraphy Project (Brown). Heidi currently holds a Rome Prize in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome, where she is writing a dissertation that assembles evidence for entrepreneurial religion in early imperial Rome and argues that it constitutes a discrete and significant class of religious activity in roughly the first century C.E. Though many of the figures and practices that populate her case studies also comprise categories like magic, astrology, mystery cults, and Judaism, she offers an analysis of the religion of independent specialists that cuts across its assorted permutations. Her wider interests include contextualizing evidence for earliest Christianity and redescribing Paul and his epistles with a view to broader patterns of independent specialist activity
Stephen L. Young
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean (Major: Early Christianity; Minor: Ancient Judaism)
Stephen received a B.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in Ancient Historyand English Literature in 2004 and graduated with a MAR inBiblical Studies, and Th.M .in Hebrew Bible, from Westminster Theological Seminary in 2008. He researches religious and philosophical specialists in the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic period, the services they offer, and especially the writing and interpretive practices of the literate among them. His dissertation approaches Paul as such a literate religious specialist and examine his use of Judean sacred writings (e.g., in traditional categories, “Paul’s use of Scripture”) in his mythmaking about the Judean god, Christ, Gentiles, Judeans, and the Judean law.
Stephen's additional areas of research and competence include: Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic philosophy; Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial period Judaism; 2nd - 3rd century Christianity (especially so-called "Gnostic" Christians and their opponents); literacy, education, and scribal culture/practices in the ancient Mediterranean; ancient Judean and early Christian claims about the afterlife. He also studies American Evangelical biblical scholarship and the contribution such research can make to the academic study of modern religion.