Niall Schroder, Author at The Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University

2021-2022 RELIGIONS AND PUBLIC LIFE GRADUATE FELLOWS ANNOUNCED

Posted on October 19, 2021 by Niall Schroder

Religions and Public Life at the Kenan Institute for Ethics explores the role of religions in historical and cultural context as they influence the lives of their adherents, interact with each other across time and geography, and contribute to the formation of institutions that make up the public sphere. This year, ten Religions and Public Life Graduate Fellows have been selected from Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill to be a part of an interdisciplinary working group to engage questions regarding the place of religion in contemporary social and political life. Building upon last year’s theme, this year’s theme will be “Immigration and Religion.”

On the working group’s focus, Professor Malachi Hacohen notes, “At a time when borders are closing and walls are being erected, an interdisciplinary graduate student group is responding with a model of collaboration for our world. Bringing together students from Divinity and the Graduate School, and with campus wide support from the Kenan Institute for Ethics, Center for Jewish Studies, Duke Islamic Studies Center, and Duke University Middle East Studies Center, graduate students studying divergent regions of the globe will explore the relationship between immigration and religion, seeking religious paths to the reconstruction of human life.” Over the course of the academic year, the cohort will discuss and develop their respective projects, providing each other with mutual support and opportunities for collaboration. Their work will be shared on the Religions and Public Life website at the conclusion of the fellowship.

Previous years’ themes include “Immigration and Religion” (2020-21), “Church and State” (2019-20), “Pain and Joy: Polemics and Praise in Religious Communities” (2018-19), and “Minorities and Diasporas” (2017-18).

Meet the Fellows:

Archit Guha is a PhD student in the History Department at Duke University. His broad areas of interest span Modern South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region, exploring how the environment, science, emotions, and migration intersect in the context of natural disasters and uncertainties around climate and weather. At Kenan, he plans to research how climate change shapes the environmental ethics of ethno-religious minorities in the Global South.

Ehsan Sheikholharam Mashhadi is a Teaching Fellow and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. Holding graduate degrees in architecture and religion, his work examines the religiosity of non-religious architecture. He draws on urban projects recognized by the Aga Khan Award for Architecture to show how spatial practices function in the construction of religious subjectivities. Ehsan has received recognition from institutions such as the University of Miami, Dumbarton Oaks’s Mellon Initiative, and the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute. His work has been published in the American Academy of Religion’s Reading Religion, Iran Namag, Maydan, and WIT Press. Ehsan also serves as a Graduate Fellow at the Parr Center for Ethics.

Elliot Mamet is a PhD candidate in political science at Duke University. His dissertation research analyzes the long entanglement of incarceration and democracy. He is interested in how the prison bounds notions of citizenship and undercuts democratic equality.

Iris Gilad is a fourth-year Art History PhD student specializing in contemporary Middle-Eastern art. Her dissertation examines maps, mappings, and spatial subversions in the artworks of contemporary women Middle-Eastern artists. She is interested in exploring the intersections of gender, race, migration, and cartography.

Jacob Sims is a hybrid graduate student at Duke University and serves as Director of IJM Cambodia where he leads a team of investigators, lawyers, social workers, programmatic, and operational staff in the fight against labor exploitation. Jacob’s research looks at where and how well the assumptions of global humanitarianism align with the totalizing project of western late-modernity versus the radical project of the Church historic. Jacob previously directed international development policy research and taught courses at the College of William & Mary, led humanitarian programs in northern Myanmar, and co-founded a social justice organization in eastern Uganda.

Jingyi Liu is a second-year graduate student in Critical Asian Humanities at Duke University. She received her bachelor’s degree in Chinese language and literature from Peking University. Her current research focuses on the literature and political history of modern China, with an emphasis on war reportage and female novels. Her areas of interest include diaspora studies, religious studies, and comparative literature.

Joseph Roso is a PhD candidate at Duke University in the Department of Sociology. He is primarily interested in the sociology of religion, with a specific focus on how religious beliefs and communal worship practices intersect. He is currently studying discourse around immigration issues among evangelical opinion leaders and how this discourse has changed over time.

Kenna McRae is an MA student in Bioethics and Science Policy at the Duke Initiative for Science and Society. She is studying how religious leaders and initiatives in resettled refugee communities affect health advocacy, policy, beliefs, practices, and outcomes in the United States. Kenna has a BS in Physics and a BA in Global Health from Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University, and she will pursue graduate education in Bioengineering after her time at Duke. She hopes to unite bioengineering, bioethics, and science policy to improve health equity for vulnerable populations.

Nicholas Harrelson is a third year Master of Divinity student at Duke Divinity School. His research sits at the intersection of conflict, religion, and immigration policy. He specifically hopes to investigate the effect of conflict in the Middle East on immigration patterns of Christian and Muslim men and women to the United States, with a particular focus on former Coalition translators and allies. Nicholas attended Virginia Military Institute (VMI) for his undergraduate education and received a Master of Arts in Diplomacy with a concentration in International Conflict Resolution from Norwich University. He is a combat wounded veteran of the Iraq War and, prior to joining the Divinity School, he served as a Staff Assistant to United States Senator Mark R. Warner, focusing on Department of Veterans Affairs casework. He is a postulant for Holy Orders in the Anglican Catholic Church.

Qiu Lin is a PhD candidate at Duke Philosophy and a research associate of Duke’s Center for Comparative Philosophy. Her main research areas are early modern philosophy, history and philosophy of modern physics, and Chinese Islamic philosophy.

2021-2022 Kenan Graduate Fellows Announced

Posted on September 30, 2021 by Niall Schroder

Each year, 15 Kenan Graduate Fellows are selected to be part of an inter-disciplinary research community focused on significant normative questions. This year’s cohort come from Ph.D. programs in five faculties/schools, and 12 different departments at Duke. They will meet throughout the year with the general aim of enhancing each other’s ability to contribute to debates involving ethical issues, and to do so in ways that engage scholars and others within, and especially outside, their own academic disciplines. Professor Wayne Norman, who directs the Graduate Fellows program, notes that “This year’s Fellows all face a double challenge. They were selected because they are each tackling timely – and often timeless – questions in their Ph.D. dissertations: political polarization, diversity and inclusion in higher education, religion and violence, global inequality, and sources of bias in moral reasoning from law to political science. But they are also trying to make sense of our world and their own career paths as we struggle to climb out of a global pandemic.”

Some students, from disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, or theology, focus directly on fundamental ethical or political concepts and theories. Other Fellows, from the sciences and social sciences, try to understand phenomena that are relevant to major, and often controversial, public-policy debates. Still others attempt to resolve debates in their areas of research that seem to be sustained by long-standing disagreements over both empirical claims and ethical or ideological commitments.

Read more about the Kenan Graduate Fellowship.

Meet the Fellows

Suhyen Bae is a PhD student in Political Science at Duke studying political behavior and political communication. Her dissertation focuses on how social isolation and loneliness shape political attitudes and preferences, specifically examining internet and social media use as an underlying mechanism. She also works on projects involving legislators, Twitter networks and social media campaign advertisements, utilizing big data and machine learning methods. Suhyen received her BA and MA in Political Science and International Relations with honors and distinction from Seoul National University in South Korea.

Mary Dance Berry is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program in Religion, Hebrew Bible/Old Testament track. Her research interests center on divine violence and divine judgment/justice as well as comparative hermeneutics, feminist criticism, and postcolonial criticism. More specifically, her work examines how different communities, from American Evangelical readers to African biblical interpreters, read and understand often troublesome biblical texts and the import of their understandings. Mary earned a B.A. in government and classical studies at Sweet Briar College and an M.Div. at Duke Divinity School.

Curtis Bram is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at Duke. He is writing about people's expectations for what candidates will do if elected, where those expectations come from, and their political consequences. Before coming to Duke, he completed an M.A. in International Relations at the University of Chicago and a B.A. at Tulane University.

Aaron Ebert is a PhD. candidate in Duke's Graduate Program in Religion, focusing on Early Christianity. He studies and writes on various aspects of early Christian thought and practice, especially in its relation to ancient and modern philosophy. The questions that most exercise him are those related to philosophical anthropology, hermeneutics, and moral and intellectual formation. His dissertation explores envy, rivalry, and schadenfreude in the thought of Augustine. Most of his spare time is given to raising and keeping up with his four children, with whom he and his wife like to garden, eat ice cream, and explore the North Carolina outdoors. Aaron received a B.S. from the University of Montevallo and an M.T.S. from Duke Divinity.

Melissa Karp is a fourth year PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke. She previously graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, and French. Her dissertation takes a comparative approach to memory studies, focusing on the ways that the wartime collaborator is represented, mythologized, and instrumentalized in French and Korean literary and memory cultures. She is particularly interested in postwar patterns of memory and forgetting that work to reify or hybridize ethnonational boundaries.

Sinja Küppers is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Classical Studies at Duke University. In her dissertation, she investigates The Social History of Higher Education in the Late Roman Empire. She is particularly interested in how language and institutions reflect social norms and questions of class, diversity and equity. For her presentation on “Studying ‘Abroad’ in Antiquity: Student Movement and Educational Policy” Sinja received the 2021 Presidential Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper by The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. At Duke, she co-founded the first-generation graduate student organization Duke F1RSTS. Before coming to Duke, Sinja received a MSt from the University of Oxford and a B.A. from the University of Cologne.

Jane Leer (she/her) is a doctoral student in Duke University’s Joint Program in Public Policy and Psychology, where her work focuses on social inequality, policy, and human development with the goal of informing the design and delivery of culturally responsive social and education policies. Her dissertation is examining (1) how the types of diversity-related values that schools communicate relate to racial and socioeconomic disparities in adolescent social belonging, mental health, and academic engagement, and (2) how growing up in a gentrifying neighborhood relates to academic engagement among adolescents experiencing poverty. In a second line of work, she examines the causal effect of policies and interventions designed to strengthen family, school, and community learning environments. This includes projects evaluating the impact of home visit parenting programs on early childhood development in Latin America and social norms interventions on adolescent gender attitudes in West Africa, as well as current work exploring how structural racism may impact Black families’ engagement in nurse home visit services in North Carolina.

Elisabetta “Betta” Menini is a third year PhD student from Italy in the Marine Science and Conservation at the Duke Marine Lab. Her dissertation is focused on the conservation of deep-sea environment in international jurisdiction within the context of deep seabed mining. The aim of her research is to inform ocean international policy and decision-making processes with the best available science and best practices in ocean conservation. She is studying the use of Area Based Management Tools to protect and manage deep hydrothermal vents. She holds two master's degrees (Marine Biology and Maritime Spatial Planning) obtained in her home country and through international programs in Europe. She recently worked in the context of public participation, and she has experience in maritime geopolitics, marine spatial planning, and invertebrates' biology and phylogenetic.

Jessica Paek is a Ph.D. candidate in the Management & Organizations department at the Fuqua School of Business. Her research examines prosocial behaviors and goal pursuit in organizations. Specifically, she investigates how leaders can offer different types of help to their employees and how receiving help can impact the goal pursuer’s future motivation. She is also interested in people’s perception of steady versus unsteady goal progress. Jessica received her B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University.

SaeHim Park (she/her) is a fourth year PhD candidate in Art, Art History and Visual Studies. Park's dissertation, "Image Politics of Representing Sexual Violence in the Asia-Pacific," examines how images shape affects, values, and judgments associated with rape, sex-trafficking, sexual slavery, and prostitution.

Kristen M. Renberg, Ph.D., is a J.D. candidate at Duke University School of Law. She studies judicial behavior and access to justice in courtrooms across the United States. Her dissertation explores the ways in which courts strategically organize themselves to encourage or evade appellate review. She received her B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Merced. Kristen completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in 2020.

Minato Sakamoto is a Japanese composer, pianist, and improviser from Osaka. Ranging from classical concert music to electronic music with heavy uses of computational technologies, his compositions practice the unserious seriously, fuse spontaneous and organic qualities, and demonstrate a clear connection to the past. His works have been featured across the United States, East Asia, and Europe in both traditional concert settings and internationally acclaimed conferences. Minato is currently studying towards his Ph.D. in composition at Duke University. For more info, please visit minatosakamoto.com.

Ben Sarbey is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Duke University. He works on topics in end-of-life ethics, including what it means to "die well," palliative care ethics, and the moral psychology of grief, aging, and dying. While focusing on philosophical and policy questions, he also has interests in medical humanities and what memoirs of dying can tell us about the dying process. Ben received his J.D. from Duke in 2017, specializing in health law and policy, and was recently a Visting Scholar at the Hastings Center.

Kelly Shi is a PhD student in Philosophy at Duke. She studies the relationship between systemic oppression and the moral development, moral challenges, and moral opportunities of oppressed individuals. She received her BA in Philosophy from Santa Clara University.

Joshua Strayhorn is a PhD candidate in History at Duke University. His research interests include 19th century African American history, specifically Emancipation, Reconstruction, and migration. His dissertation examines race, religion, and migration in post-emancipation North Carolina. More specifically, it investigates the political, economic, social, and religious factors that contributed to black desires to migrate, utilizing a religious lens to analyze how faith and spirituality shaped people's politics and freedom dreams.

What is Good Art? 2021 Call for Proposals

Posted on September 27, 2021 by Niall Schroder

The Kenan Institute for Ethics invites students from across Duke to submit artwork for What Is Good Art?–an exhibit on ethics and art that will be held at the Keohane-Kenan Gallery on the first floor of the West Duke Building on East Campus.

The theme for the show is “The New Normal: The Effects of Coronavirus”. Works should explore the impacts of Coronavirus, focusing on the role that art plays in our lives as we continue to battle the global pandemic one and a half years later. From minor changes in our everyday routine, to larger structural and systemic changes, how has our society transformed and what modifications may remain long after the pandemic is over?

Artwork may be in any two or three-dimensional format, including the following:

Painting (oil, acrylic, watercolor)
Drawing (pastel, pencil, charcoal)
Textiles
Short Film/ Video
Photography
Mixed media
Digital photographs, illustration or manipulations

Work submitted by graduate/professional students will be judged separately from undergraduate submissions. The panel-designated winners will be unveiled at the Gallery opening event, to be held on November 5th, 2021. The First Prize entry will receive $500; $300 and $100 will be awarded for Second Prize and Third Prize, respectively. One additional “People’s Choice” prize will be awarded, to be based upon the votes of event attendees and will also receive a $100 prize.

THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE IS OCTOBER 8th, 2021!

COMPETITION RULES:

The competition is open to all currently-enrolled Duke undergraduate and graduate students.

All submissions must be submitted via the submission form on the Kenan Institute for Ethics’ website by 11:59:59 pm EDT on October 8th, 2021.
All submissions must be original artwork created by the artist(s) indicated on the submission form.
Each individual artist may submit up to two (2) pieces for consideration.
Groups may submit single works, provided none of their members exceed two submissions.
Artwork may be in any two or three-dimensional format, including the following:
- Painting (oil, acrylic, watercolor)
- Drawing (pastel, pencil, charcoal)
- Textiles
- Mixed media
- Digital photographs, illustration or manipulations
  - Digital still work should be submitted as a jpeg file, with a 5 megapixel (2560 x 1920px) minimum resolution, in sRGB
- Short Film/Video (not to exceed 10 minutes in length)
  - Video work should be submitted as an mp4 file, with a minimum resolution of 720p
- Artists should include a 1-3 paragraph explanation of the work as part of the submission form. The judging panel will use this statement when evaluating the piece. If the piece is selected, the statement will be mounted alongside the work.
- A panel of faculty and staff will judge submissions based on effectiveness in fusing interesting ethical ideas and artistic expression.
- Works chosen as finalists must be available for display by November 1st, 2021. For photographs, artists may either provide printed enlargements for mounting, or the Kenan Institute for Ethics will arrange for enlargements to be made. Photographic enlargements paid for by the Kenan Institute for Ethics will be the property of the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Please contact Jose Ortega (ortega@duke.edu) for details.
- Selected pieces will be displayed in the Keohane-Kenan Art Gallery until December 6th, 2021.

Students must make arrangements to claim their work by December 13, 2021. Please contact Jose Ortega (jose.ortega@duke.edu) for details.

Submit your work here

Duke University Joseph Shatzmiller Fellowship in Jewish Studies

Posted on August 1, 2021November 23, 2021 by Niall Schroder

The Shatzmiller Graduate Fellows honor Emeritus Smart Professor Joseph Shatzmiller, who taught at Duke University from 1994 to 2010. Among his many publications, he is best known for Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society and Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society. Fellowships offer advanced graduate students the opportunity to engage with prominent national and international scholars in Jewish Studies visiting the seminar and to connect with the Jewish Studies faculty active in the seminar. Fellows receive a research stipend and a seminar session devoted to their work. The Shatzmiller Fellows are funded by the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.

Jonathan Homrighausen
Jonathan Homrighausen, a doctoral student in Hebrew Bible at Duke University, writes and researches at the intersection of Hebrew Bible, calligraphic art, and scribal craft. His writings on the subject have appeared in Religion and the Arts, Image, Teaching Theology and Religion, Transpositions, and Visual Commentary on Scripture; more recently, he curated a virtual exhibit, Visual Music: Calligraphy & Sacred Texts, for the Luce Center for the Arts & Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary. He is currently teaching in Judaic Studies at the College of William & Mary, and preparing a dissertation on the ritual, metaphorical, and material significance of writing in the Book of Esther and its reception.

Leor Jacobi
Leor Jacobi is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Bar-Ilan University. Leor’s interdisciplinary research interests, publications and talks range over Rabbinic Literature and Medieval Art and he has given presentations in Europe, America, Israel, and Abu Dhabi. He is currently the recipient of a Humboldt Stiftung Fellowship at University of Mainz, Germany, researching Manuscript fragments extracted from Medieval book- bindings in Girona, Catalonia. Leor is based in Jerusalem and can often be found loitering at the National Library of Israel.

Neri Ariel
Neri Y. Ariel obtained his Ph.D. in Talmud and Halakha at Hebrew University (July 2019). Ariel completed recently a joint research project as an interoffice collaboration (ZJS, FUB & Menczer, HUJI, Yale University). Additionally, as a cooperation partner at the Institute of Jewish History in Austria (INJOEST), at the University of Vienna, and at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), he researches Hebrew fragments retrieved from Book-Binding deepening the understanding of medieval Jewish traditions in Europe. Ariel’s Ph.D. research has focused on his discovery of a hitherto unknown genre within Judaeo-Arabic literature named Adab al-Qadi (“etiquette of judgeship” earlier known in its Hebrew name Hovot Haddayanim, submitted for publication at YBZ Institute, forthcoming). His interdisciplinary Habilitationsschrif (2nd Ph.D. at the BIU Law School) “Comparative Judaeo-Islamic Legal History: Adab al-Qāḍī” is an ongoing collaborative project. Dr. Ariel holds a Kreitman post-doctoral position at The Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought, Ben-Gurion University (2020-22. Host: Prof. Rami Reiner).

Oskar Czendze
Oskar Czendze is a PhD Candidate in the History Department and a TEP Fellow at the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. In 2021-22, he is a graduate fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York. His research focuses on the cultural and social history of Jews in East Central Europe and the United States, Jewish migration and questions of memory, belonging and place in the modern era. Among his recent publications is “Between Loss and Invention: Landsmanshaftn and American Jewish Memory in the Interwar Era,” Dubnow Institute Yearbook 17 (2018): 35-56.

Semih Gokatalay
Semih Gökatalay is currently a Ph.D. candidate in history at University of California, San Diego. His dissertation is a political and economic history of the modern Middle East during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to nation-states. It explores the development of private and indigenous interest groups in the Middle East vis-à-vis state authorities and international capitalist classes.

Yael Attia
Yael Attia is in her second year as a doctoral fellow at the research training group minor cosmopolitanisms, at the University of Potsdam. Her current research project seeks to trace the constitutive role of Jewish colonial experience in North Africa as formative to Modern Jewish political thinking, as it emerged in a series of Francophone intellectuals: Helene Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Albert Memmi. She also hosts the podcast of the Ph.D. program: minor constellations. For many years, Yael has worked in Jewish museums in Israel and Germany.

Not pictured: Robin Buller

Apply to Purpose Project Graduate Fellowships

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Niall Schroder

DukeEngage (Duke’s signature community engagement program for undergraduates) is now offering an opportunity for graduate students.

Supported by funding from DukeEngage and The Purpose Project at Duke, GradEngage is an opportunity for up to 24 Duke graduate students to deepen a partnership with a North Carolina community during academic year 2021-2022. GradEngage fellowships create opportunities for students to explore their vocation and the purpose of their graduate work by engaging with a community on a pressing social issue.

Learn more

The Race and the Professions Fellowship is a program of the Purpose Project at Duke, a campus-wide, faculty-led effort cultivating moral purpose, fostering virtuous community, and promoting flourishing professions. The Fellowship is a year-long program inviting first-year Duke graduate and professional students to explore racial justice and anti-racism within the professions. All incoming, first-year graduate and professional students are invited to apply.

Eighteen Fellows will meet about a dozen times across Fall and Spring semesters for moderated conversations that will feature visiting speakers from a variety of professions. Each session will require modest preparation. Over the course of the year, Fellows will develop individual or joint proposals for summer projects aimed at ‘‘on-the-ground” racial justice and anti-racism work.

Learn more

Apply to Kenan Graduate Fellowships

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Niall Schroder

Each year, the Kenan Institute for Ethics awards between 10 and 15 fellowships to outstanding graduate students at Duke University.

Students from any Duke Ph.D. program may apply. What each cohort of Graduate Fellows will have in common is that their dissertation research engages in interesting ways with significant normative issues. Some students, for example – from disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, or theology – focus directly on fundamental ethical or political concepts and theories. Other fellows, from the sciences and social sciences, try to understand phenomena that are relevant to major, and often controversial, public policy debates. Still others attempt to resolve debates in their areas of research that seem to be sustained by long-standing disagreements over both empirical claims and ethical or ideological commitments.

Learn more

Each year, Religions and Public Life at KIE funds a Graduate Student Working Group around a theme important to religion and public life. The Program has made Immigration and Religion a focus of its current interests, and this year’s group will continue the work begun in 2020-21. Members of last year’s group are welcome to reapply but preference will be given to new applicants.

The call is open to graduate and professional students wishing to take part in monthly interdisciplinary student-led seminars on “Immigration and Religion.” A wide variety of projects exploring this theme are welcome, including topics such as: Immigrant Religion, the Place of Religion in the Support of Displaced Communities, Religious Activists and Immigrant Rights, Religion in the Refugee Crisis, Migration and Theology, and Religion, Migration, and Identity.

Learn more