Department of Religious Studies
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New & Noteworthy
Department News
Department Receives Generous Bequest to Supplement the Richard H. Wilmer, Jr. Lectureship in Christian Studies
The estate of Mrs. Sarah King Wilmer, widow of Dr. Richard H. Wilmer, Jr., the founder and first chair of the department, has made a generous bequest to supplement the corpus of the Wilmer Lectureship in Christian Studies endowment. The Lectureship brings to campus leading scholars in Christian studies.
- Buddhist bodhisattva, China
Introducing Three New Course Offerings in Fall 2012
RELGST 1160: Jerusalem—History and Imagination
Cross-listed with HIST 1779 and JS 1160
Meets requirements: HS
Jason von Ehrenkrook
Jerusalem was and remains both a magnet for cultic devotion and an epicenter of religious conflict. This course examines the political, religious, and cultural history of Jerusalem, focusing primarily on Jerusalem as a concrete and conceptual phenomenon in the premodern period. Beginning our story in the Bronze Age, we will explore a wide range of sources—literary, archaeological, and iconographical—that bear witness to the remarkable transformation of a small, backwater village in the hills of Canaan to a sacred center for millions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims today. We will study the political, physical, and conceptual development of this urban space through its multiple destructions and reconstructions, considering the emergence of Jerusalem as a sacred space, an apocalyptic space, and a contested space.
RELGST 1240: Jews and the City
Cross-listed with HIST 1780 and JS 1240
Meets requirements: HS
Rachel Kranson
Over the course of the 19th century, millions of Eastern European Jews migrated from their places of birth to cities across the globe. This course traces this Eastern European Jewish diaspora to urban destinations around the world, before training its lens on the Jewish encounter with American cities. We pay close attention to how patterns of Jewish urbanization changed regionally and over time; how urbanization affected Jews’ home-life, leisure time, religious practices and occupational choices; how differences in gender and class affected Jews’ experiences in urban spaces; and how Jews interacted with other ethnic groups in diverse, urban environments. Delving into the history, built environment, and archival sources pertaining to the Jewish experience in Pittsburgh provides us with a dynamic case study for this crucial relationship between Jews and the city.
RELGST 1762: Guide for the Perplexed
Cross-listed with PHIL 1762 and JS 1762
Meets requirements: PH
Tony Edwards
Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) was the greatest Jewish thinker of the medieval period, and remains highly influential today. Born in Spain, he became the leading rabbinic authority of his time by writing a compendium of Jewish law, the Mishneh Torah. He was also famous as a physician and author of medical works. His widest impact, however, has been through his masterpiece of philosophy of religion, The Guide of the Perplexed. This engaging, elusive book is important not only for its influence on such major thinkers as Aquinas, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton, but also for its insight into questions of religion and rationality. In this course we study virtually all of the Guide, giving special attention to Maimonides’ account of the fall, his theory of religious language, his arguments for the existence of God, his doctrine of creation, his teachings on religious experience, prophecy, and revelation, and his views on human perfection and immortality. In our sessions we work closely and carefully through the text, at each step following up Maimonides' hints and challenges to his readers. Our goal is not merely to appreciate the surface purport of the book, but also to discern its deeper implications—through which Maimonides sought to suggest, to a few of his readers, the secret meaning of the Bible itself.
Religious Studies Welcomes New Administrator
The department welcomes Maureen Henderson as the new administrator of Religious Studies and the Jewish Studies Program. Ms. Henderson holds a BA in Business Administration and Management from California University of Pennsylvania and comes to us with some seventeen years of experience in Student Affairs and Services, including as coordinator for Multicultural Affairs at California University of Pennsylvania. At Pitt, she has previously worked as Student Services coordinator in the School of Health and Rehabilitation and and for the Graduate School of Public Health.
New Faculty Member in Modern Judaism
The department is delighted to announce that Ms. Rachel Kranson will join the faculty as an assistant professor of modern Judaism, beginning fall term 2011. Ms. Kranson succeeds Dr. Alex Orbach, who retires in April 2011 after some thirty-five years of service to the department and to Pitt.
Ms. Kranson is completing a dissertation called "Grappling with the Good Life: Jewish Anxieties over Affluence in Postwar America, 1945-1967” in a joint program in History and Jewish Studies at New York University. Her project explores post-WWII American Jewish culture with a focus on the impact of affluence on Jewish life and self-identity. The project is framed by the responsibility felt by many American Jews in the wake of the Holocaust to sustain Jewish culture and provide leadership for the rest of the Jewish world, which led to concerns that the attainment of the “American Dream” had exacted too heavy a cost on what was thought to constitute an “authentic” Jewish life, a term itself problematized by Ms. Kranson.
The postwar decades, with changes in gender roles, racial and ethnic patterns, demographics (suburbanization), politics (Cold War), and so forth, is fast becoming a major topic in American historical scholarly circles. Ms. Kranson’s research not only brings her into conversation with those who work on the experiences of other American religious communities of the period – joining other ethnic group studies in demonstrating that consumption cannot be understood without examining gender and the dynamics of power between the sexes – but also places her scholarship on the cutting edge of a fledging field working specifically on American Jews in the postwar period. Ms. Kranson’s work is thus firmly situated in cultural and social history as well as religion and politics, media and literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and religion and play.
Ms. Kranson's co-edited volume called A Jewish Feminine Mystique? Jewish Women in the Postwar Era (Rutgers University Press, 2010) was recently named a finalist for a 2010 Jewish Book Award, in the category of Barbara Dobkin Award in Women’s Studies.
For her next major project, Ms. Kranson plans on researching “To Speak for the Jews: Involvement in the American Abortion Debate, 1967-2010.” This project aspires to correct certain misleading patterns that have emerged in the scholarship surrounding the issue of abortion in America, which, with few exceptions, has framed the impact of religion on the debate only in terms of the pro-life movement (i.e., Catholic and Evangelical Protestants) v. pro-choice advocates (i.e., secular liberals and feminists).
Pitt A&S Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Social Sciences Joins Department
Kristen Tobey joins the department as a winner of a University of Pittsburgh, Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences in spring term 2011. The fellowship is for one year and is renewable for a second. Dr. Tobey earned the PhD degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School in summer 2010, where she was the 2010 Martin Marty Dissertation Fellow, for a dissertation called "Performing Marginality: Identity and Efficacy in the Plowshares Nuclear Disarmament Movement."
Kristen Tobey studies the Plowshares, a Roman Catholic pacifist group founded in 1980 by Philip and Daniel Berrigan, and dedicated to antinuclear and antiwar activism. Through trial evidence and interviews, Dr. Tobey examines their protest rituals and courtroom behavior, which led members to prison rather than abandon moral principles. Despite its commitment to peace, today Plowshares faces marginalization from the political right and left. As social and religious history, Dr. Tobey’s project addresses political conflicts of the Reagan administration through to the aging of activism. She is interested in the tensions at and fluidity of the margins, and challenges those who characterize purposeful marginalization in exclusively negative terms.
Dr. Tobey's broad interests thus lie in religious communities and utopian movements, identity maintenance and boundary work; symbolism and ritual behavior; and religious activism, social protest, and political change. She plans on following the first manuscript with a project, tentatively titled "No People are Better Fitted: Shifting Boundaries in American Religious Studies," about the Jewish agrarian utopias of late-nineteenth century America, another excellent case study of the tensions that appear on the margins between religious commitment and identity vs. membership in a plural society and the needs of survival.
Faculty News
Congratulations to Jason von Ehrenkrook on the publication of
Sculpting Idolatry in Flavian Rome: (An)Iconic Rhetoric in the Writings of Flavius Josephus (Society of Biblical Literature, 2011). This book investigates the discourse on idolatry and images, especially statues, in the writings of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, with a particular focus on his numerous accounts of a contentious and at times iconoclastic relationship between Jews and images. Placing this narrative material within a wider comparative context, both Jewish and non-Jewish, demonstrates that the impression of strict aniconism—uniform and categorical opposition to all figurative art—emerging from Josephus is in part a rhetorical construct, an effort to reframe Jewish iconoclastic behavior not as a resistance to Roman domination but as an expression of certain cultural values shared by Jews and Romans alike. Josephus thus articulates in this discourse on images an idea of Jewish identity that functioned to mitigate an increasingly tense relationship between Romans and Jews in the wake of the Jewish revolt against Rome.
Kudos to Adam Shear who, as director of the Jewish Studies Program, has been awarded a 2012-2013 Legacy Heritage Jewish Studies Project Grant for public programming, made possible through support from the Legacy Heritage Fund. Dr. Shear's The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), the first reception history in the English language of any work of medieval Jewish thought, won the esteemed 2008 National Jewish Book Award, Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award in Scholarship, and the Journal of the History of Ideas' Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history published in 2008.
Graduate Student News
PhD Student Wins Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship
Congratulations to Margarita Delgado on being awarded a Mellon Fellowship (2012-2013) for dissertation research on “Understanding the Funerary Buddha: Material Culture and Religious Change in Early Chinese Buddhism.” Ms. Delgado was also the unprecedented recipient of three one-year Chancellor's Fellowships in Chinese Studies (2008-2009, 2009-2010, 2010-2011).
Religious Studies Graduate Students Participate in Grad Expo, 2012
The Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, Grad Expo takes place this year on March 22, 2012 in the William Penn Union. Three Religious Studies graduate students are presenting papers. For the program schedule, click here.
Tucker Ferda, "The Anti-Marcionite Implications of Origen’s Textual Criticism"
Lianghao Lu, "The Taiping Rebellion's Influence on the Chinese Bible"
Emily Stewart, "Reading Technology and its Impact on Sacred Texts"
Recent Publications
Izzet Bahar, "German or Jewish, Humanity or Raison d'Etat: The German Scholars in Turkey, 1933-1952," Shofar 29.1 (2010).
Soorakkulame Pemarathana, "Early Buddhist Insights in Proliferating Concepts and Views," in New Horizons in Buddhist Psychology: Relational Buddhism for Collaborative Practitioners, edited by Maurits G.T. Kwee, Chargrin Falls, OH: Taos Institute Publications, 2010.
MA Student is Guest Columnist for Religious Studies News
David Givens penned the October 2010 "From the Student Desk" column of Religious Studies Review, published by the American Academy of Religion. Check out what he has to say about "The Intelligent Design of Online Resources."
PhD Candidate Wins Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Doctoral Fellowship
Congratulations to Hongyu Wu on being awarded a prestigious Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Doctoral Fellowship (2011-2012) for completion on her dissertation called “Leading the Good Life: Biographical Narratives of and Instructions for Lay Buddhist Women in the High Qing Period (1683-1839).” The CCK Foundation, headquartered in Taiwan, supports last-stage dissertators in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, or South America in the field of Chinese Studies in the humanities and social sciences and awards twelve fellowships each year. Hongyu was a two-time Mellon Doctoral Fellow (2006-2007, 2007-2008). Recent presentations include: "Sincerity, Morality, and Miracles in the Biographies of Good Women," American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, November 2011; “Dharma Teachers, Moral Instructresses and Talented Women,” XVth Congress of the International Association for Buddhist Studies, Taiwan, June 2011; "The Nonregressing Path to the Rebirth in the Pure Land: The Pure Land Thought of Peng Shaosheng," annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, October 2010; and "Buddhist Practices and the Womanly Way: Biographical Narratives of Buddhist Laywomen in High Qing China," XVth Congress of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 2008. She is author of "Shannüren zhuan he Qingdai Jushi Fojiao" (The Biographies of Good Women and Lay Buddhism in the Qing Dynasty) in Bai nian fojiao (Chinese Buddhist Studies in the Last Century), Wuhan University Press, 2008.
Religious Studies Graduate Students Win Chancellor's Chinese Fellowships in Chinese Studies
Lianghao LU (BA, Renmin University, Beijing) will join the graduate program in fall 2011. He has been awarded one of two prestigious Chancellor's Fellowships in Chinese Studies, which will cover two years of study (2011-2012, 2012-2013).
PhD Candidate Wins Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship
Congratulations to Nancy Klancher on being awarded a Mellon Fellowship (2010-2011) for dissertation research on "Jesus and the Canaanite Woman: Studies in the Reception of Matthew 15:21-28." Nancy has recently published "The Male Soul in Drag: Women-as-Job in the Testament of Job” in the Journal for the Study of the Pseudipigrapha 19.3 (2010).
Two FLAS Fellowships Awarded for AY 2011
Kudos to Joel Brady on winning a third-year REES FLAS Fellowship for dissertation research on "Transnational Conversions: Greek Catholic and Russian Orthodox Conversion Movements in America and Austro-Hungary (1890-1914)."
Susie Meister joins the ranks of CLAS FLAS Fellowship recipients for her work on "prosperity gospel" in Latin America.
Conference Presentations
Adrienne Spillar is presenting "Roman Catholics on the Borders of 'Us' and 'Them' in American Television Dramas" at the Popular Culture Association Meeting in Boston, April 4-7, 2012.
Susie Meister presented "The Social Gospel?: The Market of the Prosperity Gospel in Social Media" at the International Conference on Digital Media hosted by the Center for Media, Religion and Culture in Boulder, Colorado in January 2012.
Hongyu Wu presented "Sincerity, Morality, and Miracles in the Biographies of Good Women" at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in San Francisco in November 2011.
Recent PhD and MA Degrees Awarded
Marco Dozzi, for "Approaching the Fissure in Being: Parmenides, Sartre, Plotinus, and Early Christian Theology (MA, May 2011).
Peter de Vries, for "Approaching Apocalyptic: The Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and the Olivet Discourse of Mark 13" (PhD, May 2010).
Sandra Collins, for "'Weapons upon her body': The Heroic Feminine in the Hebrew Bible" (PhD, fall 2009). Sandee was appointed as adjunct professor of Biblical Studies and academic dean at the Byzantine Catholic Seminary beginning fall 2009.
Emily Bailey, for "'Eateth Not the Bread of Idleness': Church Cookbooks and Victorian American Domesticity" (MA, December 2010). Emily continues in the PhD program.
David Givens, for "Shared Visions in Shared Space: Latino and Euro-American Identity Transformation at St. Regis Catholic Church" (MA, December 2010). David continues in the PhD program.
Susie Meister, for "Work of the Lord: An Ethnographic Case Study of an Evangelical Entrepreneur" (MA, December 2010). Susie continues in the PhD program.
Wynne Lanros, for "The Ontological Argument and the Philosophy of Logic" (MA, December 2009). Wynne plans to pursue a PhD in philosophy.
Margaret Rencewicz, for "The Polish National Catholic Church: The Founding of an American Schism" (MA, December 2009). Maggie continues in the PhD program.
Alexandra C.K. Seitz, for "Arriving at the 'Proper' Moral Choice: Pittsburgh Catholics for Obama and Issues of Social Justice" (MA, summer 2009). Ali enters the PhD program in Communications in the fall.
Undergraduate News
Religious Studies Minor wins Prestigious Fulbright Award
Congratulations to Paulina Gonzales who earned her BA in English literature and history with a minor in religious studies. She is teaching English and serving as a mentor in an English-language teaching program for refugees who have been granted asylum in Malta. Paulina was one of 14 Pitt students—nine undergraduates and five graduate students—to win thi prestgious fellowship this year.
Congratulations to all our Class of 2011 graduating majors and minors and best wishes in future. Please stay in touch!
Religious Studies Major Wins Prestigious 2011-2012 Boren Award in International Studies
Cody Dickerson is one of four Pitt UHC undergraduates and 151 students nationally (out of 940 applicants) to win a David L. Boren Award in International Studies for 2011-2012 sponsored by the National Security Education Program (NSEP). Cody will spend his Boren year in China. Cody plans intensive language training at Beijing Foreign Studies University in the fall term. For the spring term, he will move to Kunming, China, where he will continue his language training and begin research on Chinese minority policies at Yunnan Nationalities University. Cody, who will be a junior this fall, is planning to graduate with a BPhil degree in Religious Studies and International & Area Studies. Cody is also a winner of a 2011 UHC Brackenridge Summer Research Fellowship for "Continuing Revelation and Homosexuality in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" (faculty supervisor, Paula Kane, Religious Studies).
Boren Scholarships and Fellowships are sponsored by NSEP, a major federal initiative designed to build a broader and more qualified pool of U.S. citizens with foreign language and international skills. Boren Awards provide U.S. undergraduate and graduate students with the resources and encouragement to acquire language skills and experience in countries critical to the future security and stability of the nation. In exchange for funding, Boren award recipients agree to work in the federal government for a period of at least one year.
Class of 2011 Major Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa
Congratulations to Sultan Ghuman on being elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest undergraduate honors organization in the United States. Election to Phi Beta Kappa is considered by many to be the most prestigious honor of academic excellence that can be conferred upon students majoring in one of the liberal arts and sciences. Sultan was one of 98 inductees this year. The initiation ceremony was held in the Teplitz Memorial Courtroom of the Barco Law Building on April 30.
Twenty-two 2010 Majors Graduate with University Honors
Kudos to our summa cum laude graduates (GPA 3.75 or higher):
- Christopher Gill
- Caryn Goldenberg
- Nichole Jordan
- Caitlin Kempf
- Colin Post
- Kumar Rupali
- Bryent Wagner
Congratulations to our magna cum laude graduates (GPA 3.5):
- Laura Bentley
- Phillip Gianmattei
- Nicole Hayden
- Margaret Jeffries
- Millie Joneja
- Laura Kennel
- John Thetford
Bravo to our cum laude graduates (GPA 3.25):
- Timothy Bryant
- Sarah D’Archangelis
- Carolyn Gerecht
- Lauren Krivinko
- Michelle Molchan
- Lynn Darby Monks
- Emily Victor
- Rose Wells
2010 Honors College Brackenridge Fellowship Winners
Jaclyn Bankert (History), for "The Persistence of Memory: Using Memoir to Understand the Holocaust" (Faculty Sponsor: Alexander Orbach, Religious Studies)
Arielle Juberg (Religious Studies and Political Science), for "Monsters and Gods: Interpretations of Birth Defects across Time and Culture" (Faculty Sponsor: Jonathon Erlen, Health Sciences Library System)
Religious Studies Majors See the World
In AY 2010, five of our majors studied abroad.
- Jessica Drake, Tel Aviv University, Israel (Fall 2009)
- Matthew Gill, Pitt in London (Fall 2009)
- Allison Huggins, Italy (Spring 2010)
- Isabelle Jargowski, Semester at Sea (Fall 2009)
- Rebecca Whalen, Turkey (Summer 2010)
Alumni News
Kaan Buyuksarac (class of 2009) participated in the 2nd Annual Buddhism in China Program (summer 2010) sponsored by the Woodenfish Project and in collaboration with the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. The program focused on
"Mount Wutai, the Yungang Grottoes and Huayan Buddhism.” The Program offers graduate students in Chinese Buddhism the opportunity for direct and intensive engagement with important historical centers of East Asian Buddhism in Jiangsu, Beijing, and Shanxi, and the opportunity interact with Chinese scholars. Kaan entered the MA Program in Buddhist Studies of Columbia University in fall 2010 with a partial scholarship.
Ariella Siegel (class of 2008) began an MA program in Religious Studies, with a specialization in Latin America, at Florida International in fall 2010.