← Back to Spring 2024 Newsletter Contents
News of DSR alumni and friends.
We would be delighted to hear from you wherever you are and whatever you're doing – please get in touch with your news.
We have a DSR LinkedIn page – please follow us! We are keen to foster networking connections with and among alumni, students and faculty – pay us a visit.
Zoe Anthony (PhD, 2022) has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tampa.
PhD alumnus (2022) Usmon Boron’s article, ““And I Believe in Signs”: Soviet Secularity and Islamic Tradition in Kyrgyzstan,” was published online in Comparative Studies in Society and History 2024: 1-27. Usmon is currently a Postodctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronoto Mississauga.
Judith Brunton (PhD, 2022), currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, will become Assistant Professor in Religion and Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas, this summer. Judith and her partner Sam also recently welcomed a new baby, Shepherd, a brother to Ernie.
Alumna Tamara Cohen (PhD, 2023) was awarded the Ludo Rocher Post-Doctoral Fellowship for her project “Non-Dual Śaivism and the Mokṣopāya” and becomes a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia in fall 2024.
Congratulations to Isaiah Ellis, DSR Arts & Science postdoctoral fellow, who will be Robert M. Kingdon Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in Fall 2024. Isaiah will then also head south in the summer of 2025 to become Assistant Professor of Urban Religions in the Department of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
In January, Jairan Gahan (PhD, 2017) presented “Sex and the Subject of Law in the National Archives of Iran” in her capacity as Executive Director of the Canadian Society for Iranian and Persian Studies. Presented as part of the Rethinking History: Returning to Archives and Documents Series from the Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Institute of Iranian Studies, University of Toronto
Mona Tokarek LaFosse's (PhD, 2011) book Honouring Age: The Social Dynamics of Age Structure in 1 Timothy was published by McGill-Queen's University Press
DSR Visiting Scholar and alumnus (2014) Bryan Levman (PhD, 2014) has three publications to celebrate:
- 2023a. “Dravidian Buddhism.” Buddhist Studies Review. Vol. 40 no. 1: 59–114.
- 2023b. Dravidian Towns in the Mahāvastu and Milindapañha: A Demographic Study. International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics. Thiruvananthapuram: International School of Dravidian Linguistics.
- 2023c. “Descent with Variation.” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. Vol. 23: 1–40.
Former DSR postdoctoral fellow Evgenia Mesaritou has been appointed Lecturer in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cyprus. From 2017-19, Evgenia worked with Simon Coleman on a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship and was a Visiting Scholar in 2019-22. Evgenia offered this generous testimonial: “My time at DSR was instrumental to the successful completion of the fellowship and to my subsequent appointment [at the] University of Cyprus. The DSR provided me with a collegial, vibrant and intellectually stimulating, interdisciplinary environment, where I could conduct high quality research, develop myself and my career through training, mentorship, and excellent supervision as well as build lasting friendships and collaboration networks. February 8 also saw the publication of her paper, “Of pilgrimages and restorations: religion, heritage and politics in divided Cyprus,” in Politics and Religion, First View, pp 1-26.
We were delighted to learn from his supervisor Walid Saleh that alumnus Annas Muchlisin (MA, 2022) has been accepted into Harvard’s doctoral program in the study of religion.
DSR alumna (BA, 2005) and associate professor at Davidson College, Rachel Pang, published Singer of the Land of Snows: Shabkar, Buddhism, and Tibetan National Identity (University of Virginia Press).
Ariel Peckel, PhD alumnus (2022) and former postdoctoral fellow, was awarded the Hume Society’s Hume Studies Essay Prize for his paper, “Hume beyond Theism and Atheism.” His essay was unanimously ranked first by all members of the prize panel.
Summer 2023 saw alumna Audrey Rochette (BA, 2016, PoliSci major, with minors in Indigenous Studies and Religion; MA Religion, 2020) become Executive Director of Anishnawbe Health Foundation, having previously been Director of Indigenous Initiatives at George Brown College.
Alumna Rachelle Saruya (PhD, 2023) published “Burmese American Youth Experiences with Theravada Buddhism in the San Francisco Bay Area,” in Courtney Bruntz and Brooke Schedneck (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Lived Buddhism (Oxford Academic, 22 Feb. 2024). Rachelle is currently Early Career Research Fellow at the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies.
DSR alumni Khenpo Kunga Sherab (PhD, 2023) and Matthew W. King (PhD, 2014) celebrated the publication by Simon & Schuster of their translation of the first volume of 17th-century historian Ameshab Ngakwang Kunga Sonam’s Amazing Treasury of the Sakya Lineage. Also, in December 2023 Khenpo Kunga Sherab was elected to the American Academy of Religion's Tibetan and Himalayan Religions Unit steering committee.