Next Year's Research Associates

We will welcome these scholars as Women's Studies in Religion Program Research Associates for the 2013-14 year:

Lihi Ben Shitrit

University of Georgia

Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies and Religion and Society and WSRP Research Associate

Colorado Scholar

Women's Activism in Jewish and Muslim Religious-Political Movements

The project sets out to explain variation in forms of women's activism in socially conservative religious-political movements in the Middle East through a comparative ethnographic study of four movements: the Jewish Settlers in the West Bank, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, the Islamic Movement in Israel, and the Palestinian Hamas.

Sarah Bracke

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology of Religion and WSRP Research Associate

Female Piety in Contemporary Catholic Renewal and the Concept of Agency

This sociological investigation is based on field work with a Catholic Renewal movement in France during the Great Jubilee of 2000. Concerned with questions of power and subjectivity at the intersection of religion and gender, it explores processes of self-fashioning as well as the capacity to act (agency), both in relation to the divine and sexual difference.

Hsiao-wen Cheng

Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology of Religion and WSRP Research Associate

Female Sexuality in Pre-modern China

This project examines the historicity of female sexuality in middle period China (from the Six Dynasties to the Song); traces the changing and conflicting conceptualizations of female sexuality in both elite and popular discourses; and presents evidence of women's efforts to create new space and to look for new resources in order to negotiate autonomy over their sexual bodies and explore their desires.

Amanda Izzo

College of New Jersey

Visiting Lecturer in Women’s Studies and American Religious History and WSRP Research Associate

The Commandment of Love: Liberal Christianity and Global Activism in the Young Women's Christian Association and the Maryknoll Sisters, 1907-80

Using case studies of two influential women's organizations, the project highlights the role of liberal Christianity in the history of twentieth-century American activism. Tracing the connections between the turn-of-the-century mission enthusiasm and left-wing liberation struggles of the 1960s-70s, it demonstrates the endurance of single-sex organizing and the importance of religion as a medium of transnational relationships.

Jacquelyn Williamson

University of California, Berkeley

Visiting Lecturer on Women’s Studies and Near Eastern Studies and WSRP Research Associate

A Sex Goddess and a Queen: The Discovery and Analysis of the Lost Temple of Nefertiti

Virtual reconstructions of Nefertiti's temple will be created, presenting new information on the status of Nefertiti as a cosmogonic goddess in the "heresy" of the Amarna Period. Further, by placing her queenship in its international context the project demonstrates the power inherent in the religious status of queens throughout the ancient Mediterranean world.