Center for the Study of World Religions Names Fellows

September 23, 1999

SEARCH THE GAZETTE

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

The Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) is host to 27 fellows and visiting scholars from around the world for the 1999-2000 academic year.

Established in 1958, the CSWR fosters excellence in the study of religions of the world on the broadest scale and from many perspectives. International in composition and subject matter, the Center facilitates the exchange of ideas growing out of scholarly research. This dialogue takes place most notably in the Director’s Seminar, where all fellows meet regularly to present their ongoing research and to act as a sounding board for the work of others.

Deliberately designed to assemble leaders from across the spectrum of scholarship, the CSWR Senior Fellowship program provides scholars time for investigation and access to the resources of the University. Senior fellows join dissertation fellows, doctoral studies fellows, and fellows-in-residence chosen from doctoral programs at Harvard. Additionally, the Center provides seniors from Harvard College the opportunity to participate through the Undergraduate Thesis Fellowship. Fellows are selected for the excellence of their proposed research in religion. The Center offers them an option of residence and a focal point for scholarly exchange.

Each year, the Center also invites the Yehan Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhism and hosts other visiting professors and scholars who teach and work on their research projects.

The 1999-2000 CSWR fellows and visiting scholars are as follows.

Senior Fellows
Victor Balaban recently completed his dissertation in psychology at Emory University. During the fall term, he will undertake an interdisciplinary study combining cognitive approaches to psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, as well as documentary photography, to explore and document contemporary apocalyptic movements and how such belief systems are manifested on the Internet.

Saadia Chishti, the retired vice chancellor of the Women’s University, Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan, will study the concept of fitra, the primordial nature of humanity. While at the Center for the full year, Chishti will work on a project titled "Fitra: The Islamic Nature of Man," which will comprise a review of the Qur’an, the Sunna, and traditional Islamic exoteric and esoteric literature leading to an initial set of postulates about fitra.

Anne Davenport, a research scholar in the History of Science Department will work on her book titled Science and the Contemplative Self, which examines the ways in which scientific modalities have been used historically for spiritual purposes.

Rela Mintz Geffen, a professor of sociology at Gratz College, will be in residence for the fall semester to work on her book on the contemporary American Jewish family. Geffen’s book will consider the interaction of religion, family structure, and Jewish identity and will synthesize research done in the last half century.

Young-ho Kim, a professor of religion at Inha University, Inchon, Korea, will be in residence during the spring semester to work on his project titled "The Complementary Pluralism: Toward the Buddhist-Christian Dialogue."

Jane Magon, a lecturer in the faculty of arts, Sunshine Coast University College, Queensland, Australia, will be at the Center during the fall to reevaluate the perception among scholars that Australian culture is irreligious. She will examine the spiritual contemporary art of Dale Frank, Mike Parr, Kill Orr, Lyndall Milani, and Aboriginal artists from the Western Desert medicine man "Dr. George" Tjapaljarri and John Mundine (Arnhem Land).

Gisela Mettele, an assistant professor at Technische Universitat, Chemnitz, Germany, will be in residence for the full year to work on her project "The Construction of Lives in the 18th and 19th Century Moravian Movement," which examines the experiences and value systems of the members of the Moravian Brethren movement through personal memoirs they were required to keep.

Medhi Mozaffari, a professor of political science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, will be at the Center during the fall semester to work on his project, which explores the reciprocal impact of globalization and civilization and the consequences of this mutual impact on the quality of relations between international actors as well as on patterns of conflict and cooperation and peace and war in the next millennium. Using empirical cases drawn from Islamic societies, Mozaffari will examine the depth and scope of change, and will project the paths of cooperation and antagonism in the future.

Thomas Oller, an instructor at Harvard Extension School, will be at the Center during the academic year to work on his project which investigates relations between Buddhists and shamanists in modern-day Mongolia, including spiritual, ritual, and cultural ties, mutual influences, and mutual recognition.

Marilene Phipps, a painter and poet with a focus on Haitian Vodou, wants to express the metaphysics of religion by focusing on diasporic religions in general and on altars in particular. The "living altar," the manifestation of the divinity through trance possession that transforms the person possessed into a living altar, will be the object of her current research. Phipps will trace the origin and development of each divinity. The study of these various aspects of the divinities will lead her to paint images approximating portraits and representing a spiritual and psychological map of important aspects of human personality and behavior. She will be at the Center for the full year.

Peter Slater is a professor emeritus of Trinity College, Toronto, and a member of the Graduate Centre for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. While at the Center for the spring semester, Slater will study the role of dialogue in the study of religion, critiquing the emphasis on living faith in the works of Cantwell Smith and other ex-missionaries turned historians of religion.

Nili Wazana, from the Department of Bible Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and currently also a visiting scholar at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, plans to complete her book Lands and Borders: Territorial Concepts in the Bible and the Ancient Near East in which she will present a new approach to the study of territorial conceptions in biblical and ancient Near Eastern societies.

Dissertation Fellows
Leor Halevi is completing his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies. He is interested in the history of religion and the medieval worldview, and specializes in Arabic sources and the intellectual history of Islam. Halevi is currently working on two research projects: one on the ideological changes that, over the course of the 12th century, polarized economic interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims; and the other on the structure and development of the thought of al-Ghazali (1058-1111 C.E.).

Allan Maca, a doctoral candidate in the archaeology wing of the Department of Anthropology, will work on his thesis, which addresses biases in archaeological approaches to ancient Maya settlement patterns by highlighting ethnographic and ethnohistorical records of Maya ritual and cosmology.

Fellows-in-Residence
Candi K. Cann, a doctoral student in the Committee on the Study of Religion, will survey and document various underground Christian movements in modern communist China. Her work will compare and contrast the Christian underground movements with each other, employing such categories as modernity, urban and rural movements, Han Chinese movements, and ethnic minority movements. Additionally, she will analyze the movements’ relationship with the Three-Self Movement (the officially sanctioned church in China) by considering the doctrines, teachings, and canons of these movements.

Puneeta Kala is a doctoral student in the Committee on the Study of Religion. Her research is a comparative study of the new religions of Japan and India with special emphasis on the phenomenon of the living god as it is manifested in the two societies.

Tamara Lanaghan, a doctoral student in the Committee on the Study of Religion, is interested in the goddess traditions of India and their relationship to places of pilgrimage. Her research concerns the tradition surrounding the goddess Sri Mahalakshmi of Kolhapur, India, and she is working on a translation of the Karavira Mahatmya, a Sanskrit text praising the goddess and the city of Kolhapur.

Neelima Shukla-Bhatt, a doctoral student in the Committee on the Study of Religion, will research cultural expressions of devotion in medieval India with a focus on devotional poetry in Hindu, Islamic, and Sikh traditions. She is translating the poetry of Narasinha Mehta, a medieval Gujarati saint-poet, and will examine his poetry in the context of the development of various traditions of devotional poetry in India during that period.

Doctoral Studies Fellow
Zheng Yan is beginning her doctoral studies in the Committee on the Study of Religion. Her research will examine the interaction between religion and culture, and in particular the interplay among the great tradition of Confucian scholarship, Chinese vernacular culture (with a dominant Confucian component), and Buddhism and Christianity.

Visiting Professors
Vittorio Falsina is a visiting professor at the Divinity School this year and will teach courses on religious ethics and international political economy, exploring the theological and ethical dimensions of trade, economic distribution, poverty, and justice. Falsina is a former Warren Weaver Fellow in the Global Environment Division of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Mary MacDonald, a professor of history of religions at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, will teach two courses at the Divinity School this year: Religions of Melanesia in the fall, and Myth, Ritual, and Ger in Melanesia in the spring. MacDonald will also collaborate with the director and Center staff on CSWR programs and work on her manuscript "God and the Ancestors: Indigenous Religions and Christianity in Melanesia."

Peter Skilling, curator of the Pali Text Society/Fragile Palm Leaves, Bangkok, will be at the Center for the spring term as the Yehan Numata Visiting Professor in Buddhism. While at the University, Skilling will teach Perspectives in Buddhism in South East Asia at the Divinity School.

Visiting Scholars
Prapod Assavavirulhakarn, lecturer and head of the Pali and Sanskrit Section, Department of Eastern Languages, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, will be at the Center during the academic year to study curses and blessings in premodern Southeast Asia from the point of view of religion.

Edwin Bryant, a lecturer in the Committee on the Study of Religion, will teach four courses during the academic year: Reading of Hindu Texts, Hindu Gurus in the West, The Rise of the Goddess Tradition, and a course on Krishna.

Sarah Stroumsa is an associate professor in the Department of Arabic and Jewish Thought, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and a Starr Fellow at the Center for Jewish Studies for 1999-2000. Stroumsa will examine the applicability and usefulness of the concept of "philosophical schools" in medieval Judeo-Arabic thought.

Undergraduate Thesis Fellows
Ying Liu is completing her senior thesis through the Department of Psychology. Liu’s thesis is centered on Qigong, a collective name for various schools of meditation practiced in China. This past summer, Liu conducted research in her home country, China. Her study focuses on two aspects of Qigongits historical roots in Buddhism and Taoism, and its contemporary role as a substitute for religion.

Adam Rambert, a senior in the History of Science Department, spent the summer conducting research into the healing that occurs at Lourdes sanctuary in France. His primary interest lies in the controversies that arise and in the tensions that exist between religious and scientific communities concerning the nature and authenticity of faith healing and miracles.