Joukowsky Institute doctoral student Liza Davis is among the six students selected for the Brown University Graduate School's 2021 Open Graduate cohort. Through the Open Graduate Education program the students are supported to pursue a master’s degree in a secondary academic field, enabling them to expand their studies into interdisciplinary areas of research.
In addition to pursuing her doctoral degree in Archaeology and the Ancient World, Davis is interested in learning more about the interactions between religious communities during Late Antiquity. She wants to explore questions about how Christians, Jews, and polytheists interacted and how these communities informed, inspired, borrowed from, or tried to change one another. To explore these questions, Davis seeks a more holistic understanding of the role of religion and the theoretical and methodological approaches to studying religion, something she hopes to attain through a secondary master’s degree in Religious Studies. She credits the Open Graduate Education program for making this interdisciplinary line of inquiry possible. “The Open Graduate Program is the encapsulation of this spirit of cross-departmental collaboration. In undertaking a secondary degree in Religious Studies, I will be able to engage with two distinct epistemologies, gain exposure to diverse sets of evidence and strands of thought, and be able to better understand one key piece of the human story—religion,” says Davis.