Faculty

Donna E. Arzt (J.D., Harvard Law School, 1979 LL.M., Columbia University, 1988), Professor, College of Law, and Director of the Center for Global Law and Practice. Donna Arzt teaches public international law, comparative constitutional law, international human rights and refugee law.Her current research interests include the Middle East peace process, refugee law, religious freedom, humanitarian intervention and Islamic law. She has published extensively in the field of human rights law and is author of the Council on Foreign Relations Press book, Refugees Into Citizens: Palestinians and the End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Philip Arnold (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1992), Associate Professor of Religion. Prof. Arnold specializes in native traditions of the Americas with special emphasis on Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations and Iroquois traditions. His publications include Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan, Eating Landscape (1999) and articles on ritual symbolism, cultural contact, and "book culture" in native communities. His current interests are on the problems of interpreting American religions in their material contexts utilizing the issues and insights of Native American traditions. 
Carol Babiracki (Ph.D. University of Illinois 1991) Associate Professor of Fine Arts. Prof. Babiracki specializes in teaching and research on Musicology and Ethnomusicology, especially South Asian music and dance, ethnic and immigrant music and dance in the U.S., music of the Middle East. Her research focuses on the interplay of gender, religion and dance in the tribal music of India. 
Michael Barkun(Ph.D. Northwestern), Professor of Political Science. Prof. Barkun's research interests include religion and politics, millenialism, political violence, and international law. He is the author or editor of ten books, including A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003); Religion and the Racist Right (1994 and 1997); Crucible of the Millennium (1986); Disaster and the Millennium (1974 and 1986); and Law Without Sanctions (1968). Prof. Barkun serves on the editorial boards of Terrorism and Political Violence and Nova Religio and has participated in joint activities between the FBI and the American Academy of Religion. 
Mehrzad Boroujerdi (Ph.D. The American University, 1990), Associate Professor of Political Science. Professor Boroujerdi's research interests focus on the intellectual history of the contemporary Middle East, and Third-World resistance to modernity and cultural globalization. He is the author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (1996). 
Zachary Braiterman (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1995), Assistant Professor of Religion and Judaic Studies. Prof. Braiterman works in the field of modern Judaism, specializing in the 20th century. He is the author of (God) After Auschwitz (1999). His latest project examines shifting aesthetic canons defined by Judgendstil, Expressionism, and Bauhaus as they shape modern Jewish thought and culture in Germany prior to the Holocaust. Research and teaching interests touch upon the impact of modernity upon Jewish self-expression, ritual, text-interpretation, and community life.
John Burdick (Ph.D. City University of New York, 1990), Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) and Director of the Syracuse Social Movements Initiative (SSMI). His publications include Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race and Popular Christianity in Brazil (1998) and Looking for God in Brazil (1993). His current research interests include assessing the effects on Brazilian popular culture of pentecostalsim and the progressive Catholic Church.
Alexander Fernández (M.Architecture, Syracuse, 1987) Assistant Professor of Architecture, DIPA Florence. Prof. Fernández currently teaches in the Florence program, where he continues an in-depth study of Carthusian monasteries and their relationship to religious rituals.
Fred M. Frohock (Ph.D., North Carolina), Professor of Political Science. Prof. Frohock's academic concentrations are political philosophy, law and bioethics. His nine books include Healing Powers (1992), a study of alternative medicine and spiritual healing, and Lives of the Psychics (2000), which is an examination of various claims for alternative realities and the implications of these claims for scientific and religious discourses. 
Michael Gaddis (Ph.D., Princeton University, 1999), Assistant Professor of History. Prof. Gaddis' research and teaching interests focus on religion in the Late Roman, Late Antique and Early Medieval periods. He is also interested in the comparative and cross-cultural study of religious violence and extremism, from ancient times to the present. His forthcoming book is titled There is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire.
Ann Grodzins Gold (Ph.D., University of Chicago, Anthropology, 1984), Professor of Religion and Anthropology. Prof. Gold's  publications include articles on spirit possession, semiotics of identity, the practice of ethnography, women's ritual storytelling, children's environmental perceptions, moral interpretations of climate change, memories as history, and feminist fieldwork, as well as four books: Fruitful Journeys: The Ways of Rajasthani Pilgrims, A Carnival of Parting: The Tales of King Bhartari and King Gopi Chand, Listen to the Heron's Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (co-authored with Gloria Raheja), and forthcoming in 2001, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power and Memory in Rajasthan (co-authored with Bhoju Ram Gujar) and  Sacred Landscapes and Cultural Politics: Planting a Tree (co-edited with Philip Arnold)
M. Gail Hamner (Ph.D., Duke University, 1997), Assistant Professor of Religion. Prof. Hamner specializes in religion and culture, with teaching interests in religion and film, Christianity and American culture, religion and literature, and feminist theory and the study of religion. Her research on C.S. Peirce and William James resulted in the book, American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy (2003). She is currently is researching the teaching of religion and film, as well as feminist and marxian theorists' use of love as the central force of their politics.
Susan Henderson (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1989), Associate Professor of Architecture. Prof. Henderson's fields of teaching are modern architectural history, the history of Islamic architecture and urban history. Her research area is early modern architecture in northern Europe. 
Samantha Kahn Herrick (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2002), Assistant Professor of History. Prof. Herrick researches and teaches the history and culture of medieval Europe. Her research focuses on saints' Lives composed in medieval Normandy and France. She is especially interested in the role of saints' cults and hagiography in medieval society; the nature of apostolicity; and questions of memory, fraud, literacy, and power.
Tazim Kassam (Ph.D., McGill University, 1993), Associate Professor of Religion. Prof. Kassam is a historian of religions specializing in the Islamic tradition. Her research and teaching interests include gender, ritual, devotional literature, syncretism and the cultural heritage of Muslims particularly in South Asia. In her book Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance (1995), she explores the origins and creative synthesis of Hindu-Muslim ideas expressed in the song tradition of the Ismaili Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent. 
Prema Kurien (Ph.D. Brown University), Associate Professor of Sociology. Prof. Kurien's research focuses on the relationship between religion, ethnicity, and international migration. Her first book, Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and the Reconstruction of Community Identities in India (2002), explored differences in migration and migration-induced social change of three ethno-religious communities in Kerala, India. She is completing a second book, Multiculturalism and Immigrant Religion: The Development of an American Hinduism, on the institutionalization of Hinduism as a minority religion in the U.S. and the politicization of Hinduism. She is also doing research on Indian Christian Americans, and on how Indian Americans have entered the public sphere in the U.S.
Norman Kutcher (Ph.D. Yale University, 1991), Associate Professor of History. Prof. Kutcher specializes in late imperial Chinese history. His research interests include Confucianism, orthodoxy, the nature of imperial power, and the domestic life of emperors. He is the author of Mourning in Late Imperial China: Filial Piety and the State (1999). His current research project is a study of Yuanming Yuan, the primary residence of Qing emperors which was destroyed by European powers in 1860.
Joseph M. Levine (Ph.D., Columbia, 1965), Distinguished Professor of History. Some of Prof. Levine's books include: Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (1999) and The Autonomy of History: Truth and Method from Erasmus to Gibbon (1999). Among his current projects is The Trial of the Witnesses: History and Religion in Early Modern England. 
Dennis McCort (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University 1970), Professor of German and Comparative Literature. Prof. McCort specializes in literature and psychology and in literature and religion, esp. East-West relations. His courses focus on Buddhist, particularly Zen-Buddhist, paradigms and values as expressed in Western writers, such as Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, J.D. Salinger and Thomas Merton. Recent published work includes a book, Going beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen, and Deconstruction (2001) and an edited special issue of Symposium on the topic, "Kafka and the East."
Patricia Cox Miller (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1979), Professor of Religion. Prof. Miller focuses her teaching on religious traditions in classical and Greco-Roman antiquity. In her research she deals more particularly with the religius imagination in late antiquity in Gnostic, Neoplatonic, and early Christian traditions. Her books include Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man (1983) and Dreams in Late Antiquity (1994). She is currently working on two books: a source book for the study of women and religion in Greek patristic sources, and a study of religion and aesthetics in late antiquity. 
Micere Githae Mugo (Ph.D., University of New Brunswick, 1973), Professor of African American Studies. Dr. Mugo's research interests include Orature, Literature, Theater, Creative Writing, Pan African Studies, Education, Women and Developmental Issues. Her undergraduate education covered studies in Philosophy and Religion, including African Indigenous Religions and Islam, in which she still retains a scholarly interest. Her major book publications are: My Mother's Poem and Other Songs, African Orature and Human Rights, Visions of Africa, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (with Ngugi wa Thiong'o), Daughter of My People, Sing! and The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti. She has also co-edited eight supplementary readers for Zimbabwean schools
Gustav Niebuhr (M.A. Oxford, 1980), Professor of Religion & Media, College of Arts & Sciences and Newhouse School of Public Communication, and Director of the Religion & Society Program. Over a twenty-year career in journalism at the Atlanta Constitution, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and, most recently, the New York Times, Gustav Niebuhr has established a reputation as a leading writer about American religion. His forthcoming book examines religious pluralism in America.
Richard B. Pilgrim (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1970), Associate Professor and Chair of Religion. Prof. Pilgrim works primarily with religion and art in Japan, Japanese religion more generally, and Mahayana Buddhist thought and practice. He has written Buddhism in the Arts of Japan (1981, 2nd ed. 1993) and coauthored Japanese Religion: A Cultural Perspective (1985) and Religion: An Introduction (1985). 
Marcia Robinson (Ph.D. Emory University, 2001) Assistant Professor of Religion. Prof. Robinson specializes in the history of Western Christian thought and culture, with an emphasis on 19th-Century Europe and America. Her research focuses upon theological anthropology and aesthetics; religion, culture, and identity; and religion and art. These interest converge in her study of Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish religious thinker and poet; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an African-American poet, abolitionist, and activist; Henry O. Tanner, an African-American religious painter; and Benjamin Tucker Tanner, an African Methodist Episcopal bishop, biblical scholar and church historian.
Dennis Romano (Ph.D., Michigan State University, 198l), Professor of History. Prof. Romano's teaches and does research on early modern Europe, renaissance Italy, and especially Venice. He has written Housecraft of Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1600 (1996) and Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State (1987). His current research focuses on the biography of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1423-1457, and envy in Late Medieval & Renaissance Italy. 
Maureen Trudelle Schwarz (PhD University of Washington, 1995), Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Prof. Schwarz is a cultural anthropologist whose area of specialization is Native North America. She has written Molded in the Image of Changing Woman: Navajo views on the human body and personhood (1997) and Navajo Lifeways: Contemporary Issues, Ancestral Knowledge (2001). She is currently writing a book about Navajo women who are ceremonial practitioners (tentative title: Blood and Voice: The Apprenticeship and Practice of Navajo Female Ceremonial Practitioners) based on interviews with women who do a wide variety of healing and prophylactic ceremonies.
Milton C. Sernett (Ph.D., University of Delaware, 1972), Professor of African American Studies and History. Prof. Sernett's principal areas of teaching and research are African American religious history, the American South, the abolitionist movement, and American social reform movements. He is the editor of African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (1999), the author of Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (1997) and is working on a book to be called Harriet Tubman & the American Memory: the Forging of an American Icon. 
John Scott Strickland (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, 1984), Associate Professor of History. Prof. Strickland's interests focuse on the American South, African American religion and culture, United States social history, 1700-1900. He has written Millennial Visions and Visible Congregations: Conversion, Community, and the Culture of Resistance Among South Carolina Slaves (1996). 
Heidi Swarts (Ph.D., Cornell, 2001), Assistant Professor of Political Science. Prof. Swarts's fields of interests are American social movements, religion and politics, and American political thought and culture. Her dissertation is titled "Moving without a Movement: Organized Churches and Neighborhoods in American Politics."
Laurence Thomas (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh). Professor of Philosophy, and of Political Science. Professor Thomas is the author of Living Morally: A Psychology of Moral Character (1989), Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust (1993) and Sexual Rights and Human Orientation with Michael Levin (1999), and numerous articles in moral theory and social philosophy. 
Margaret Susan Thompson (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1979), Associate Professor of History. Prof. Thompson's teaches and does research on national politics, religion and politics, and the Catholic Church. She is the author of The Spider's Web: Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (1985), and serves as a special consultant to the National Coalition of American Nuns. 
Susan S. Wadley (PhD University of Chicago, 1973), Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies and Anthropology, and Associate Dean of the Colleg of Arts & Sciences. Prof. Wadley's research has focused on popular religion, oral traditions, and public culture resulting in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia (1995) and Oral Epics in India (1989). Her interests currently focus on three topics: cultural change in rural India as it responds to ‘globalization’; the relationship of social change to patterns of education, of fertility, of female-specific mortality, and women’s status more generally; and an oral epic, Dhola, sung in the Braj regions of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. 
Joanne Punzo Waghorne (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1976) Professor of Religion. Prof. Waghorne works in contemporary theoretical directions in the study of religion, especially issues of changing religious organizations, practices, and self understanding in the present era of mass communication, urbanization, globalization and transnational migration. Her publications contextualize these issues in contemporary urban India and in the Hindu diaspora, and include The Diaspora of the Gods: Modern Hindu Temples in an Urban Middle-Class World (in press), The Raja's Magic Clothes: Re-visioning Kingship and Divinity in England's India (1994), and Gods of Flesh/Gods of Stone: The Embodiment of Divinity in India (co-edited with Norman Cutler, 1985).
Ernest Wallwork (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1971), Professor of Religion and of the Cultural Foundations of Medicine. Prof. Wallwork teaches religious ethics, bioethics, and the psychology and sociology of religion and morals. A practicing psychoanalyst in private practice and consulting bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health and with the U.S. Navy, he is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics (1991), Durkheim: Morality and Milieu (1972), and coauthor of Critical Issues in Modern Religion (1973, 1989). 
James W. Watts (Ph.D., Yale University, 1990), Associate Professor of Religion. Prof. Watts teaches Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern textual traditions in courses ranging from biblical studies to the religions and literatures of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Ugarit, and Israel, including Second Temple Judaism. He is the author of Reading Law: The Rhetorical Shaping of the Pentateuch (1999) and Psalm and Story:  Inset Hymns in Hebrew Narrative (1992).