Faculty Associates


Faculty associates are members of the Princeton University faculty who have expressed particular interest in the activities of the Center and who help to advise Center staff about relevant activities and interests in their respective departments and programs. The research and teaching interests of faculty associates are publicized in the Center's brochure, on its website, and in the Undergraduate and Graduate Announcements as a service to students interested in knowing more about faculty resources in the study of religion. Faculty associates during 2005-2006 include:

Leora F. Batnitzky (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Religion. Her teaching and research interests include philosophy of religion, modern Jewish thought, hermeneutics, and contemporary legal and political theory. In 2002 she was awarded Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. She is the author of Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered and the editor of the forthcoming Martin Buber: Schriften zur Philosophie und Religion. She has just completed a new book on the philosophies of Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas, Strauss and Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation. Funded by a three year New Directions fellowship from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, she is beginning a new project on the relations between modern legal theory and modern religious thought. Since 2004 she is the co-editor of Jewish Studies Quarterly and she currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies in the department of religion.
batnitzk@princeton.edu

Wallace Best is Professor of Religion and African American Studies. His research and teaching center on African American religious history, religion and literature, Pentecostalism, the Nation of Islam, religion, gender and sexuality, and Womanist theology. He is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952, Princeton University Press. He is currently at work on two books: an anthology entitled Elder Lucy Smith: Documents from the life of a Pentecostal Woman Preacher and an exploration of the religious thought of the poet Langston Hughes, entitled Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem.

John W. Borneman (Ph.D., Harvard University) is Professor of Anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in Germany and Central Europe, and is currently engaged in research in Lebanon and Syria. He has completed projects on the symbolic forms of political identification, the relation of the state to everyday life, forms of justice and accountability, and on regime change. Currently he is working on an anthropology of secularism. From 1991 to 2001 he taught at Cornell University, and has been guest professor at the University of California, Berkeley; Stockholm University (Sweden); Bergen University (Norway); guest professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (France); Fulbright Professor at Humboldt Universitaet zu Berlin (Germany) and the University of Aleppo (Syria). He has written widely on kinship, sexuality, nationality, and political form, with an ethnographic focus on Germany--and currently Lebanon. His most recent publications include Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation (1992); Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice, and Accountability in Postsocialist States (1997); Subversions of International Order: Studies in the Political Anthropology of Culture (1998); Death of the Father: Toward an Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (2003), and The Case of Ariel Sharon and the Fate of Universal Jurisdiction (2004). Professor Borneman teaches courses on culture and international order, the anthropology of memory, and money, sex, and cultural diversity. He is on leave 2008-2009.

D. Graham Burnett (Ph.D., Cambridge University, Trinity College) is Associate Professor of History. He is a historian of science, and recently held the Christian Gauss Fund University Preceptorship. Professor Burnett graduated from Princeton in 1993 as the salutatorian and a recipient of the Pyne Prize. With the support of a Marshall Scholarship he completed a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University (1997 [2001]), where he was a member of Trinity College. Burnett was awarded the 1999 Nebenzahl Prize in the History of Cartography, and he has been editorially involved with the History of Cartography Project. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001 he taught at Yale and was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Columbia University and an inaugural fellow in the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His interests include the history of natural history and the sciences of the earth and the sea from the 17th through the 20th centuries, including cartography, navigation, and hydrography. His recent research has examined the role of the geographical sciences in European colonialism. He has also worked on Charles Darwin, the history of exploration, and early modern optics. His first book, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (2000), examines the relationship between cartography and colonialism in the 19th century. He is also the author of Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (2005), a monograph on Cartesian thought and 17th-century lens making, and A Trial By Jury (2001), a narrative account of his experience as the jury foreman on a Manhattan murder trial. His most recent book, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Trial That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (2007) won the 2008 New York City Book Award and the 2008 Hermalyn Prize in Urban History.  Burnett has written essays and reviews for a variety of publications, including the New Yorker, the Economist, the American Scholar, Daedalus, the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Republic.  He recently became an editor at the Brooklyn-based art magazine Cabinet, and he serves on the editorial board of Lapham's Quarterly. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and at Princeton he is affiliated with the Program in History of Science, the Law and Public Affairs Program, and the Princeton Environmental Institute.

Michael W. Cadden is Director of Program in Theater and Dance, Senior Lecturer in Theater and Dance in the Lewis Center for the Arts. He began his career at the Yale School of Drama, where he worked for four years as a dramaturg at the Yale Repertory Theatre under Lloyd Richards and as a lecturer in the dramaturgy, directing, and acting programs at the Yale School of Drama. Since 1981, he has been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English, teaching summer programs for high school teachers of English in Vermont, New Mexico, Alaska, and at Oxford University; under Bread Loaf’s auspices; in partnership with Iowa’s Alan Mokler Macvey, he has offered four NEH Summer Institutes for Secondary School teachers. In his classrooms, public lectures, and written work, Cadden has consistently attempted to build bridges between the world of academia and the world of professional theater; in 1995, he served as the Chair of the Modern Language Association’s Drama Division. He has also served as editor of a CD-ROM version of Ibsen’s A Doll House, curator of a major library exhibition centered on the life and work of Oscar Wilde, and co-editor of Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism. He has published essays on Athol Fugard, Tony Kushner, Martin McDonagh, Edward Albee, Frank McGuinness and many other contemporary dramatists. For the last thirteen years, he has been a judge for the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He is also proud to have offered Princeton’s first course in Gay and Lesbian Studies. In 1993, he was awarded the University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. In 2003, he happily helped inaugurate Princeton’s new Roger S. Berlind Theater ─ ten years in the planning and the jewel in the crown of Princeton’s performing arts community.

Slobodan Ćurčić is Professor of Art and Archaeology. He has finished writing the text of his book Architecture in the Balkans from Diocletian to Süleyman the Magnificent (ca. 300-ca. 1550), to be published by Yale University Press (London). He is working on a number of other project, among them the organization of the exhibition “Architecture as Icon: Perception and Representation of Architecture in Byzantine Art”. The exhibition is co-sponsored by Princeton University and the European Center for Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Monuments, in Thessaloniki, Greece. The show will open in the Fall 2008 in Thessaloniki and in the Spring 2009 in Princeton. A catalogue being specifically prepared for this occasion will accompany the exhibition. At Princeton, Curcic organized (with Shari Kenfield) an exhibition of photographs, entitled “The Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai”, based on archival material of the late Princeton Professor Kurt Weitzmann. The exhibition, opened in May 2006, was planned to coincide with a seminar on the Monastery of Saint Catherine, taught by Professor Curcic during the Spring semester of 2006. The exhibition will remain on view until November. In 2004, Curcic was elected Honorary Member of the Christian Archaeological Society in Athens. In 2005, he was appointed by Koïchiro Matsuura, The Director-General of UNESCO, to an international Experts Committee on the Rehabilitation and Safeguarding of Cultural Heritage in Kosovo. Curcic lectured widely during 2004-06, giving lectures and seminars in Moscow (twice), Thessaloniki, Frieburg (Switzerland), Athens, GA, and Philadelphia, PA . He also presented two papers at the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies, in London in August 2006. He has been awarded a Research Grant from the A.S. Onassis Foundation in Athens, Greece, and will be spending a month there in the Spring 2007. In 2006 he was appointed the Director of the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton.

Patricia Fernández-Kelly (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Faculty Associate, Office of Population Research.

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Ph.D., Princeton University) is a Professor in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America, University of Chicago Press, and editor of Is it Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism, University of Chicago Press. His research interests include American pragmatism, specifically the work of John Dewey, and African American religious history and its place in American public life. esglaude@princeton.edu

Anthony T. Grafton (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Henry Putnam University Professor of History. His special interests lie in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He joined the Princeton History Department in 1975 after earning his A.B. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and spending a year at University College London, where he studied with Arnaldo Momigliano. Professor Grafton likes to see the past through the eyes of influential and original writers, and has accordingly written intellectual biographies of a 15th-century Italian humanist, architect, and town planner, Leon Battista Alberti; a 16th-century Italian astrologer and medical man, Girolamo Cardano; and a 16th-century French classicist and historian, Joseph Scaliger. He also studies the long-term history of scholarly practices, such as forgery and the citation of sources, and has worked on many other topics in cultural and intellectual history. Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others. Two collections of essays, Defenders of the Text (1991) and Bring Out Your Dead (2001), cover most of the topics and themes that appeal to him. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1993), the Balzan Prize for History of Humanities (2002), and the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award (2003). He is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and the chair of the Council of the Humanities.

Eric Gregory (Ph.D., Yale University) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion. His teaching and research interests include religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, bioethics, and the role of religion in public life. In 2007 he was awarded Princeton's President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.  A graduate of Harvard College, he did graduate studies in theology as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and received his doctorate in religious studies from Yale University. He is the author of Politics & the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago, 2008), and various articles on religion and social ethics, including "Before the Original Position: The Neo-Orthodox Theology of the Young John Rawls" (Journal of Religious Ethics, 2007).  He has received fellowships from the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  In 2004, he organized an interdisciplinary conference, "A Legacy of Provocation: Augustine Reconsidered," for the Center and in 2007 he co-organized the Center’s conference on “The Good Samaritan in the Global Age: Migration, Religion, and the World Economy.” His current project examines secular and religious perspectives on global justice. 
gregory@princeton.edu

Melissa Harris-Lacewell (Ph.D., Duke University) is Associate Professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is also a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Professor Harris-Lacewell is author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, (Princeton 2004). This text demonstrates how African Americans develop political ideas through ordinary conversations in places like barbershops, churches, and popular culture. The work was awarded the 2005 W.E.B. DuBois book award from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. It is also the winner of the 2005 Best Book Award from the Race and Ethnic Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Her academic research has been published in scholarly journals and edited volumes and her interests include the study of African American political thought, black religious ideas and practice, and social and clinical psychology. She is at work on a new book: For Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Wasn't Enough. It is an examination of the connections between shame, sadness, and strength in African American women's politics. More information can be found on Professor Harris-Lacewell's personal webpage.

Amaney Jamal (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University. Her current research focuses on democratization and the politics of civic engagement in the Middle East. She extends her research to the study of Muslim and Arab Americans, examining the pathways that structure their patterns of political and civic engagement in the US. Jamal's first book, Barriers to Democracy, explores the role of civic associations in promoting democratic effects in the Middle East. Her second book, an edited volume with Nadine Naber (University of Michigan) looks at the patterns and influences of Arab and Muslim American racialization processes (Winter 2008). She is writing a third book on citizenship in the Arab world. Jamal is principal investigator of "Mosques and Civic Incorporation of Muslim Americans," funded by the Muslims in New York Project at Columbia University; co-PI of the "Detroit Arab American Study," a sister survey to the Detroit Area Study, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation; co-PI of the Arab Barometer Project, and Senior Advisor on the Pew Research Center Project on Islam in America, 2006. In 2005, Jamal was named a Carnegie Scholar.Professor Jamal is on leave 2008-2009.

Susan Naquin (Ph.D., Yale University) is Professor of History and East Asian Studies, specializing in the early modern history of China (16th through 19th centuries). She teaches courses in religion, material culture, and China's frontier regions. She has edited (with Chün-fang Yü) Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China and is the author of Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900.
snaquin@princeton.edu

Elaine Pagels (Ph.D., Harvard University) is the Harrington Spear Paine Foundation professor of Religion. The recipient of numerous prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship, her publications include The Gnostic Gospels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, and The Origin of Satan. Her most recent book is Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (2004). She is currently researching the publications on the Nag Hammadi texts published during the last fifteen years.
epagels@princeton.edu

Beate Pontgratz-Leisten (Ph.D., Tuebingen) is lecturer for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University since 2003. Between 1990 and 1999 she was assistant professor at Tuebingen University. From 1999 to 2003 she taught at the Universities of Freiburg, Bryn Mawr, Yale, University of Pennsylvania and at the Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1997, she did her habilitation at Tuebingen University. She holds a PhD and MA in Ancient Near Eastern and Religious Studies (Tuebingen University) as well as a Diploma (MA) in French and Spanish for interpreting and translating (University of Mainz). Her research covers the history of religion and literature as well as the lexical tradition of Ancient Mesopotamia. Pongratz-Leisten has published a number of scholarly contributions in journals and collective volumes. Her books include Die kulttopographische und ideologische Programmatik der akitu-Prozession in Babylonien und Assyrien im 1. Jahrtausend v. Chr. (Philipp von Zabern, 1994); Herrschaftswissen in Mesopotamien (University of Helsinki, 1999); together with H. Kühne and P. Xella, Beiträge zu altorientalischen und mittelmeerischen Kulturen (Neukirchener Verlag, 1997). Currently, she is about to finish a book on Cosmology and Anthropology in Mesopotamia and works on her next book with the tentative title Shaping the Divine in Mesopotamia. She is on the editorial board of Religion Compass and is involved in the publication of the lexical lists of Assur organized by the Assur Projekt and the Deutsche Orientgesellschaft. She is also editing the Altorientalische Literatur for the new edition of Kindler’s Literatur Lexikon.

Sara S. Poor (Ph.D., Duke University) is Associate Professor of German. After holding positions at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (1995-96) and Stanford University (1996-2002), she joined the faculty at Princeton in September of 2002. While at Stanford, she was awarded a Mellon Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania Humanities Forum, where she taught and did research from 1999-2000. And she currently holds the Charles G. Osgood University Preceptorship (2005-2008) from Princeton University. Her primary research interests are in the areas of Gender Studies and medieval German literature, interests which are reflected prominently in her teaching. Her first book,  Mechthild of Magdeburg and Her Book: Gender and the Making of Textual Authority was awarded the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship's 2006 Prize for the best first book on a medieval feminist topic. It takes a historical approach to the complex theoretical issues surrounding the study of medieval manuscripts, women's writing, and canon formation and was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2004. She is also at work on a second book project on women and medieval books, tentatively entitled Reading Compilations: The Contexts, Contents, and Owners of Fifteenth-Century German Devotional Books, as well as a series of articles on gender configurations in medieval German courtship narratives. Professor Poor has also recently completed two editing projects: a collection of essays, edited in collaboration with Jana K. Schulman (Western Michigan University) called Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity (2007 Palgrave Press) and two issues of Medieval Feminist Forum (No. 38 and 39, Winter 2004 and Summer 2005). As part of efforts to foster the continued study of medieval German literature and culture in the United States, she has co-founded an association of American medievalists (YMAGINA) that is active in bringing young medievalists together at conferences, as well as in establishing more lasting and productive connections between medievalists and modernists in our field.

Carolyn Rouse (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and also teaches in the Program in African-American Studies. She has done extensive fieldwork with African American converts to Sunni Islam, as well as with the sickle cell disease community which includes doctors, patients, families, and advocates. In addition, she has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), a film about a lesbian wedding; and Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998). She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam and Uncertain Suffering: Racial Disparities and the Politics of Sickle Cell Disease.
crouse@princeton.edu

Peter Schaefer (Dr. Phil., University of Freiburg) is Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Religion. He is also the Director of Princeton's Program in Judiac Studies. The editor of Jewish Studies Quarterly, he is the author of numerous books which have been translated into several languages, including The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World, The Hidden and Manifest God: Some Major Themes in Early Jewish Mysticism, and Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World. He is also co-editor, with M. R. Cohen, of Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco.His latest books are: Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God From the Bible to the Early Kabbalah, Princeton University Press, 2002, The Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered: Archaeological, Historical, and Literary Perspectives on the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, Tuebingen 2003, and Der Triumph der reinen Geistigkeit. Sigmund Freuds "Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion", Berlin and Wien 2003. Schaefer's research interests include Jewish History in Late Antiquity, the religion and literature of Rabbinic Judaism, Jewish Mysticism, 19th and 20th century Wissenschaft des Judentums and Jewish Magic.
pschafer@princeton.edu

Esther H. Schor (Ph.D., Yale University) is Associate Professor of English and former Acting Director of Jewish Studies. She teaches in the areas of British Romanticism, Victorian poetry, women writers, and the Romantic canon. She is the author of Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria and the forthcoming Britain and the Italian Idea, 1815-1870. She has edited the Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley (forthcoming), and co-edited The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond "Frankenstein"; Women's Voices: Visions and Perspectives.
eschor@princeton.edu

Nigel Smith (Ph.D., Oxford) is Professor of English. Nigel Smith is currently Chair of the Renaissance Studies Committee at Princeton, to which he came from the University of Oxford, England, in 1999.  He has published mostly on early modern literature, especially the seventeenth century; his work is interdisciplinary by inclination and training.  His interests have included poetry; poetic theory; the social role of literature; literature, politics and religion; literature and visual art; heresy and heterodoxy; radical literature; early prose fiction; women’s writing; journalism; censorship; the early modern public sphere; travel; the history of linguistic ideas.  The authors he has covered include Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hobbes, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Marvell.  New work involves the comparison of English with literatures in other European and some oriental vernaculars in the context of political and scientific transformation between 1500 and 1800, notably as authors and texts migrated from one place to another often in order to escape persecution.  His major works are the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Andrew Marvell’s Poems, a TLS ‘Book of the Year’ for 2003, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (Yale UP, 1994) and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640-1660 (Oxford UP, 1989).  He has also edited the Journal of George Fox (1998), and the Ranter pamphlets (1983).  A biography of Marvell, a study of Milton’s poetry and prose, and (with Nicholas McDowell) an extensive anthology of 17th-century radical literature, are forthcoming.  He is a Senior Behrman Fellow at Princeton, has been the recipient of British Academy and NEH Research Awards, and was the British Academy Chatterton Lecturer for 1998.  He gave the inaugural senior lecture at the Nicholson Center for British Studies, University of Chicago, 2004, an Anniversary Seminar at the Center for Editing Lives and Letters at the University of London in 2003, and has been active in radio and TV broadcasting in the UK and the US since 1989.  He is Princeton’s representative at the Folger Shakespeare Library Institute.

Jeffrey Stout (Ph.D., Princeton University) is the author of The Flight from Authority, Ethics after Babel, and Democracy and Tradition, as well as co-editor of Grammar and Grace: Reformulations of Aquinas and Wittgenstein. He is now completing a book on religious groups and grassroots democracy, tentatively entitled Blessed Are the Organized. Stout's interests include theories of religion, religious and philosophical ethics, philosophy of religion, social criticism, political thought, modern theology, and film. He is a contributing editor of the Journal of Religious Ethics. He served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2007.
stout@princeton.edu

Judith Weisenfeld (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Professor of Religion. Weisenfeld joined the Princeton faculty in 2007. Her field is American religious history, with particular emphasis on 20th century African American religious history, black women's history, and religion in American film and popular culture. She is the author of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York's Black YWCA, 1905-1945. She is currently working on a project on African American religious performance in the early 20th century. She currently serves as Departmental Representative.

Muhammad Q. Zaman is Robert H. Niehaus '77 Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Religion. His research interests include: religious authority in classical, medieval, and modern Islam; history of Islamic law in the Middle East and in late medieval and modern South Asia ; institutions and traditions of learning in Islam; Islamic political thought; and contemporary religious and political movements in the Muslim world. He is the author of The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change; Religion and Politics under the Early Abbasids; and Ashraf Ali Thanawi: Islam in Modern South Asia. With Robert W. Hefner, he is also the co-editor of Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education and, with Roxanne L. Euben, of a forthcoming volume on Islamism. Among his current projects is a book tentatively titled Internal Criticism and Religious Authority in Modern Islam.