天美传媒

Jill Heinrich is a Professor of Education. She taught high school English for eleven years, and her research interests include religious literacy and separation of church and state in American public education, masculinity studies, comparative education in Belize, and poverty and education. Heinrich teaches an off-campus course in San Pedro Town on the island of Ambergris Caye in the country of Belize. Academic History PhD in English Education, University of Iowa, 2001 MS in Secondary School Administration, University of Iowa, 2000 MS in English, Illinois State University, 1989 BA in English, Northern Illinois University, 1985

Marie Griffith, the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, is currently the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and the editor of the Center鈥檚 journal, Religion & Politics. Griffith is a frequent media commentator and public speaker on current issues pertaining to religion and politics, including the changing profile of American evangelicals and ongoing conflicts over gender, sexuality and marriage.

Julia Robinson Moore (Ph.D., Michigan State University) joined the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Charlotte in 2005. She teaches courses in African American religion, religions of the African Diaspora, and racial violence in America.  Her first book, Race, Religion, and the Pulpit: Reverend Robert L. Bradby and the Making of Urban Detroit (2015), explores how Second Baptist Church of Detroit鈥檚 nineteenth minister became the catalyst for economic empowerment, community-building, and the formation of an urban African American working class in Detroit. Her second book project, 鈥淭ies that Bind鈥�: African American Presbyterians in the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New South, speaks to the historical complexities of black and white race relations in the cities of Charleston, Charlotte, and Savannah through the sacred context of the Presbyterian Church. Her third book project is titled Lynching Rituals: Anti-Black Violence Through the Lens of Mimetic Theory and seeks to situate race as a category of analysis within mimetic theory through the study of anti-black violence and terrorism in the New South.

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Nadieszda Kizenko researches and teaches Russian history, with a focus on religion and culture. She explores the history of Orthodox Christianity, saints’ lives as a historical source, lived religion, political liturgy, women’s written confessions, and depictions of religion in film. Her first book, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (Penn State University Press, 2000) examined the cult of a charismatic priest whose cult spanned the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A Russian edition appeared as “小胁褟褌芯泄 袧邪褕械谐芯 袙褉械屑械薪懈: 芯. 袠芯邪薪薪 袣褉芯薪褕褌邪写褌褋泻懈泄 懈 褉褍褋褋泻懈泄 薪邪褉芯写» (Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, 2006). Her history of confession in Russia spanning four centuries, Good for the Souls: A History of Confession in the Russian Empire, was published with Oxford University Press in 2021 (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/good-for-the-souls-9780192896797?). She has now begun a new project exploring the intersection of women, devotional practice, and writing. Prof. Kizenko's courses and seminars cover Russian history, East European history, religion and film, and European history in general. Recent dissertations supervised by Prof. Kizenko include: “Science and Culture on the Soviet Screen: Russian and Member Republic Biographical Films during the Early Cold War, 1946-1953,” “Promiscuous Pioneers of Morality: The Code of Ethics of a Secret Service Functionary in Communist Poland as Set by Law and Practice, 1944—1989,” "Sacrifice in the Name of Sacred Duty: The Representation of the Decembrist Wives in Russian Culture, 1825-Present," and "Striving for Salvation: Margaret Anna Cusack, Sainthood, Religious Foundations and Revolution in Ireland, 1830-1922.”

Catherine O'Donnell is an expert in cultural and intellectual history, American political thought and religious studies. O'Donnell is a faculty head and professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies. As an associate history professor, she teaches courses on early American history and the Atlantic World. O'Donnell is the author of two books, Elizabeth Seton: American Saint and Men of Letters in the Early Republic. She has also written articles appearing in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, Early American Literature, and the US Catholic Historian.

Atalia Omer is professor of religion, conflict and peace studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Keough School of Global Affairs, at the University of Notre Dame. She earned her Ph.D. in religion, ethics and politics (November 2008) from the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Her research focuses on religion, violence and peacebuilding as well as theories and methods in the study of religion and Palestine and Israel. She was a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow resulting in "Decolonizing Religion and Peacebuilding" (forthcoming with Oxford University Press). Conversing with decolonial scholarship across multiple fields of study, this forthcoming book examines, through an extensive empirical work in Kenya and the Philippines, how and why the practices of religion, peacebuilding and development both reinforce and exceed global structural, neocolonial and epistemic forms of violence. The book traces why a consolidation of the industry of religion and peacebuilding (or the “harmony business”), in the intersection of neoliberalism and an orientalist security discourses, disempowers religious action at the same time that it empowers religious actors. It exposes another ironic insight: “more is less,” meaning that rather than enhancing religious literacy, the “harmony business” diminishes hermeneutical horizons. Even as a growing focus in the policy world on the “global engagement with religion” bills itself as a paradigm shift away from a secularist ignorance of the causal capacities of religious actors, meanings, networks and institutions, this increased investment in “engaging” with religion is utilitarian. It focuses much more on function or doing religion or being religious as a matter of communal boundaries, rather than on content or knowing religious traditions as living and contested sites of interpretations and reimagining. Yet, the decolonial and intersectional lens cannot obscure the existence of the multiple religious actors in the global South and their participation in projects of survival, which includes investing in interreligious and intercultural peacebuilding actions. Such religious actors generate decolonial openings regardless of being firmly grounded in closed rather than hermeneutically open or fluid accounts of their religiosity and communal narratives. They should not be theorized away. Analyzing their work offers an opportunity to rethink the study of religion, violence and peace practices, their relevance to theory and theory’s relevance to them. Omer’s first book, "When Peace is Not Enough: How the Israeli Peace Camp Thinks about Religion, Nationalism and Justice" (University of Chicago Press, 2015), examines the way the Israeli peace camp addresses interrelationships between religion, ethnicity and nationality, and how it interprets justice vis-à-vis the Palestinian conflict. This work scrutinizes the “visions of peace” and the “visions of citizenship” articulated by a wide spectrum of groups, ranging from Zionist to non-Zionist and secular to religious orientations. Omer’s second solo-authored book project, "Days of Awe: Reimagining Jewishness in Solidarity with Palestinians" (University of Chicago Press, 2019), explores why divergences in conceptions of national identity between “homeland” and “diasporas” could facilitate the proliferation of loci of analysis and foci of peacebuilding efforts, which are yet under-explored both in peace studies and specific scholarship addressing the relations between diasporas and conflict. As a locally situated, distant issue movement, Jewish Palestine solidarity offers a grassroots critique and a transformative agenda for the local Jewish-American landscape while also critiquing Israeli policies and Zionist interpretations of Jewish identity. This book examines the intentional participation of this movement in intra-traditional work that seeks to provincialize Zion from Jewish identity and inter-traditional work that seeks to undo the intersections between Islamophobia in the U.S. and the marginalizing and silencing of lives in Palestine. Inter-traditional work is also examined as pivotal to the movement’s efforts to deconstruct the conflation of critique of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism. Likewise, the movement participates in a broader, intersectional solidarity analysis that connects Palestinian struggles with other sites of injustice, both locally and globally, from #BlackLivesMatter to protests against the wall between the U.S. and Mexico. Omer has published articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion; the Journal of Religious Ethics; Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal; the Journal of Political Theology; the Study of Nationalism and Ethnicity; the International Journal of Peace Studies; Critical Sociology; Critical Theory of Religion; The Review of Faith and International Affairs; and Method & Theory in the Study of Religion. Omer is also a Senior Fellow at Harvard Divinity School’s Religion and Public Life’s Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative. She was the recipient of a research fellowship from the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies (Fall 2011), Charlotte W. Newcombe’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2007) and Harvard University Merit Fellowship (2006). She was a doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University (2002-2004) and a Graduate Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University (2006-2008).

Dr. Rebecca A. Glazier is an associate professor of political science in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Her research agenda addresses issues of religion, political communication, and U.S. foreign policy. She is particularly interested in how religion motivates political action, and has published research on the role of providential religious beliefs in the process. She also studies the scholarship of teaching and learning and has published articles on the efficacy of various teaching strategies, including simulations, satire, and smartphone apps.

Christina Kilby's research specialization is Tibetan Buddhism. In this field, she was awarded a fellowship by the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia to apply analytical bibliography (the study of books and manuscripts as physical objects) to Tibetan literary materials. She can speak broadly to the role of Buddhism in Tibetan culture both historically and in the context of the modern Chinese state.
She is also developing new research and courses on the intersections between religion and the global refugee crisis, such as religious ethics of hospitality, religious meaning ascribed to migration experience, policies of inclusion and exclusion based on religious affiliation, and the role of faith-based refugee relief and resettlement organizations. 
She earned her bachelor's degree in religious studies from Davidson College, her master of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, and her doctorate in history of religions from the University of Virginia. She received a Fulbright-Hays fellowship in 2013-14 and has conducted extensive fieldwork among Tibetan communities in China, India, Nepal and the United States.