Department of Religious Studies
Graduate
Current Graduate Students
Graduate Student Office
2616 Cathedral of Learning
412.648.9084
Izzet Bahar
PhD student
MA, April 2006
Research areas: medieval and modern Ottoman/Turkish Jewish history, historiography and religion
Dissertation topic: “Jewish Immigration through Turkey to Palestine, 1939-1945: Rescue and Relief”
MA thesis: "Jewish Historiography on the Ottoman Empire and its Jewry from the Late Fifteenth Century to the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century"
Emily Bailey
MA student
Research areas: American monasticism, Zen in America, Buddhist-Christian dialogue, the Transcendentalist movement
Joel Brady
PhD student
TA/TF mentor
Research areas: history of Greek Catholicism (Byzantine Rite Catholicism), ethno-religious, hybridity (i.e., the convergence of multiple ethnic and religious traditions), American and East European religion, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism
Dissertation topic: “Transnational Conversions: Greek Catholic Converts to Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe and America”
Andrew Cole
PhD student
Research areas: religion in America, religion and age, religion and masculinity
Margarita Delgado
PhD student
Research areas: Daoism, the encounter between Buddhism and Daoism, religion and environmental philosophy, orientalism
Peter de Vries
PhD candidate
Research areas: philosophy of reading, New Testament
Dissertation title: “Toward a Metaphoric Understanding of Apocalyptic Literature: Paul Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics and the Discourse of Mark 13”
Marco Dozzi
MA student
David Givens
MA student
Research areas: the impact of Christian fundamentalism in America and Christian conservative politics, modern Christian apologetics and creation theology, faith relations in America
Patrick Hughes
PhD candidate
A&S-GSO graduate student liaison
Research areas: irreligion and unbelief, early 19th-century Freethinkers, the Enlightenment critique of revealed religion
Dissertation title: “A Reception History of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason”
Nancy Klancher
PhD student
Research areas: New Testament studies, Second Temple Judaism, early Christianity
Wynne Lanros
MA student
Research areas: epistemology of religion, religious conversion, philosophy of religion
Beth Lyman
MA student
Susie Meister
MA student
Research areas: "Health and wealth gospel" (a.k.a. prosperity gospel) in the United States and Brazil, women in Christianity, homosexuality and religion, Evangelical Christianity in the United States
Soorakkulame "Pema" Pemarathana
PhD student
Research areas: innovative forms of Theravāda Buddhist liturgical practices in Sri Lanka
Matthew Peterson
PhD student
Research areas: intellectual heritage that gave rise to the social gospel and related movements in American religious history, Value Theory and the liberal religious tradition from Kant to Ritschl, Rauschenbusch, and M.L. King
Margaret J. Rencewicz
MA student
Research areas: immigration from Central Europe (especially Polish immigration) to the United States and Canada (late 1800s to mid-1900s), “troublemakers” in the Roman Catholic Church (schismatic groups), the Polish National Catholic Church in America, Canada and Poland, working-class history
Alexandra C.K. Seitz
PhD student
MA, August 2009
Research areas: religion as a force in U.S. social and political movements, sociology of religion, American religious history, ethics, religion and the media
MA thesis: “Arriving at the ‘Proper’ Moral Choice: Pittsburgh Catholics for Obama and Issues of Social Justice”
Rebecca Slavin
PhD student
Adrienne Spillar
PhD student
AAR graduate student liaison
Research areas: Catholicism and colonialism, imperialism, and postcoloniality in the Americas (especially the United States and Mexico) and the Caribbean (particularly Haiti), popular religion in the United States, theory and method in the study of religion (Marxist, colonial, postcolonial theory, category of religion)
Hongyu Wu
PhD candidate
Research areas: early modern and modern Chinese Buddhism, Japanese Pure Land Buddhism
Dissertation title: “Leading the Good Life: Biographical Narratives of and Instructions for Lay Buddhist Women in the High Qing Period (1683-1839)”