About our Graduate Students
Andrea Allgood Smith
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Anna Bialek
Religion and Critical Thought
Anna Bialek
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
Elizabeth A. Cecil
Elizabeth received a B.A. with High Distinction in Philosophy and Religious Studies from Hastings College in 2005, and an M.A. in Religious Studies and Sanskrit from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2008. Elizabeth’s dissertation, “Mapping a Contested Landscape: Religion, Politics, and Place in the Making of Pashupata Identity,” investigates the growth of the earliest Shaiva devotional movement (i.e. the Pashupatas) in early medieval northwest India. Through an interdisciplinary approach that unites philological work on Sanskrit manuscripts and inscriptions with the study of material culture, her research explores the use of sanctified spaces to articulate a Shaiva identity grounded in site-specific religious practices. More broadly, her research interests include Hindu devotional movements, Sanskrit literature, iconography, epigraphy, and pilgrimage.
From August 2011- May 2013 Elizabeth was a visiting Research Fellow in the Institute of Indian Studies at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. In Groningen she joined an international team of scholars in the editing and analysis of the Skandapurana, a recently recovered Sanskrit text preserved in 9th century palm-leaf manuscripts. In connection with the Skandapurana project, she also conducted fieldwork at temple sites throughout north India and assisted with archeological survey in Maharashtra.
Elizabeth has been awarded Mellon Dissertation Fellowships from the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Social Science Research Council to support her dissertation research in India in 2013-2014.
Niki Kasumi Clements
Religion and Critical Thought
Niki Clements
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 judgments. She is also investigating how contributions from neuroscience, moral psychology, and social-scientific theory can complement 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 Dingeldein
Laura is a Ph.D. Candidate studying the history of ancient Mediterranean Christianity from its beginnings in the first century C.E. through its imperial acceptance in the fourth century. She received a B.A. in Religious Studies and Graphic Design from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2006; in 2008 she graduated from Duke University with a M.A. in Religion. Her dissertation, provisionally entitled, “Paul and Moral Development in Early Christianity: Gaining the Mind of Christ,” limns Paul’s program of moral development, providing historical context for and illumination of his program through comparison with Stoic, Platonic, and Epicurean systems of moral progress. The dissertation is primarily aimed at delivering a comprehensive reading of 1 Cor 2:6-3:4 (which lies at the heart of modern debates over Paul’s views of equality-in-virtue amongst brothers in Christ) and at thoroughly situating Paul within his historical context. Laura’s broader research interests include the intersection between philosophy and religion in antiquity, the Pauline epistles and their reception by later Christian authors, issues of gender and sexuality in the Greco-Roman world, the application of modern historiographical theories and methodologies to the study of early Christianity, and the use of matter in the religious practices of Christian and non-Christian elites in late antiquity.
Reyhan Durmaz
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Reyhan is a student of Late Antiquity and Syriac Christianity. She received an M.A. in Anatolian Civilizations and Cultural Heritage Management from Koc
Reyhan Durmaz University (Istanbul) in 2010 specializing in the ecclesiastical architecture of the Syrian Orthodox Church. She received a second M.A. in Medieval Studies from Central European University (Budapest) in 2012; in her CEU thesis she analyzed a group of saints' lives from Tur 'Abdin, focusing on their thematic foci and perceptions of sacred space. In addition to ecclesiastical architecture and the monastic and hagiographic traditions of the Syriac Church, her research interests include the formation of sacred landscapes and various aspects of Syriac Christianity under early Islamic rule. She is a dedicated student and friend of the Suryoye in Tur 'Abdin, and a devote lover of Istanbul.
Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos
Early Christianity
Rebecca Falcasantos
Rebecca is a fourth 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 Greek 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 diversity in Late Antiquity and strategies used in the promulgation of a normative Christian cultural diversity 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.
Paul Firenze in English from Mississippi State University with a focus on the literature of the American South, and an M.A. from the University of 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), and the Cogut Center for Humanities (Ethics and the Humanities and Making Choices: Ethics at the Frontier of Global Science) and Judaic Studies (History of the Holocaust). He is currently working on his 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
Nicholas received an A.B. in Philosophy from Brown University in 2006, and an M.A.R in Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology from Yale Divinity School in 2011. He is primarily interested in Pragmatic and Romantic traditions in American religious thought in the 19th and 20th centuries as sites of a progressive theorizing of religion. His other interests include: the epistemology of religious belief in the late modern and contemporary West; theories of the “secular” and how they inform the “religious”; and the relationship between skepticism and reason in modern philosophical theology. He is also interested in highlighting the theological element in the history of western philosophy as a way to understand the major themes of modernity and postmodernity, and the associated ideas of enlightenment, tradition, and critique.
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
Omar Haque
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, neurethics, ethics at the end of life, cognitive neuroscience, Darwinian medicine, science and religion.
David Le
Religion and Critical Thought
Megan K. McBride
Religion and Critical Thought
Megan received a B.A. in Psychology from Drew University in 2000 and a 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 a M.A. in Government from John 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, and just war theory.
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 causes 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 pub on Friday evenings.
John Parrish
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Daniel Picus
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Daniel PicusDaniel Picus, BA Macalester College (Classics, magna cum laude); MSt Oxford (Jewish Studies in the Greco-Roman Period, with distinction)
Daniel is a third third year in the Department of Religious Studies. He is broadly interested in religion in Late Antiquity, specializing in the eastern part of the Mediterranean. Though he focuses particularly in the Rabbinic period between Byzantine Palestine and the Sassanian Empire, his interests extend to Syriac, Greek, and Latin sources. He is interested in the way religion and the idea of learning, education, or paideia relate to each other in this period, and in how textual practices come to be forms of piety.
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.
Matthew Redovan
Religion and Critical Thought
Miguel 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," intersubjectivity, 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-a-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 third year in the RAM program, focusing on the culture and religion
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 ancient historiography, comparative Semitic philology, ritual violence, and Israelite family religion. She is particularly interested in the treatment of bodies, both alive and dead, as means of communicating social and political affiliations. Her research also engages the intersection of family religion and the construction of social memory.
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 recently 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, Mililbank, Kahn) and critical theory (Benjamin, Agamben).
Adrien Stoloff
Adrien Stoloff
Asian Religious Traditions
Adrien received a B.A. from St. John's College in Liberal Arts and an M.A. from Columbia University in East Asian Languages and Cultures with a specialization in East Asian Religion and Philosophy. His primary research interests include: Classical Daoist thought, the appropriation by Daoists of Chinese ideas of cosmogony and cosmology, the influence of Daoist beliefs on Chinese (especially Chan) Buddhism, Daoist perceptions of the body as a vehicle for transcendence, and Daoist body cultivation including neidan and waidan practices. His secondary, broader interests include: Daoist beliefs and their influence on Classical Chinese Medicine, the reception of Daoist beliefs in Japan, how Daoism was viewed in early modern Chinese society, and how these views were transmitted to a Western audience.
Andrew Tobolowsky
Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean
Andrew received a B.A. from Brown University in Religious Studies in 2007,
Andrew Tobolowsky and 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 about 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.
Robyn F. Walsh
Early Christianity
Robyn received a B.A. (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Class
Robyn Walsh Valedictorian) in Ancient Studies (Religious 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 WendtHeidi 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 the 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 re-describing 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
Stephen Young History and English Literature in 2004 and graduated with a MAR in Biblical 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 examines 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, 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.