School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-20 of 52 Results
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Hongmin Ahn
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2026
BioHongmin Ahn is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University, where he studies modern Korean and Japanese religions. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he connects religion, history, and anthropology by examining how the memories of colonization, war, and national division have shaped the lives of Korean religious communities, both in Korea and in diaspora (most prominently Japan).
Unified by an underlying focus on the body — one living, one dead — his research interests stretch across two seemingly disparate areas. The first turns to the living body in its most kinetic, yet monotonous, devotional form: prostration. He examines the emergence of prostration as a popular practice — often performed in sets of 108, 1,080, and 3,000 — in modern South Korea, asking how this bodily devotion rose to prominence as a means of coping with contemporary challenges that lay members face. Focused on sensorial, emotional, and spatial experience, he looks at how lay practitioners construct selfhood and subjectivity through this repetitive corporeal movement.
The second turns to the dead body: the remains of Koreans who died in Japan during the colonial and post-colonial eras. Unfolding the layered historical traumas left by the Japanese Empire, he explores the contested belonging of these bodies (both physical and spiritual) between the unwelcoming hostland and the divided homeland. He examines three types of posthumous care extended to them: ethnic care by fellow Korean religious communities, civic care by Japanese faith communities, and lastly, what he terms "violent care" by nationalistic Shinto institutions, most prominently Yasukuni Shrine.
Before Stanford, Hongmin was an IAFOR Global Fellow at the Osaka School of International Public Policy (OSIPP), The University of Osaka, and completed a year of Japanese-language study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Yokohama. He holds a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Bachelor of Arts in the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions from Bard College. -
Anna Bigelow
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
BioAnna Bigelow is Associate Professor of Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at Stanford University. She received her MA from Columbia University (1995) and PhD in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara (2004) with a focus on South Asian Islam. Her book, Sharing the Sacred: Practicing Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford University Press, 2010) is a study of a Muslim majority community in Indian Punjab and the shared sacred and civic spaces in that community. Bigelow's current projects include a comparative study of shared sacred sites in India and Turkey and an edited volume on material objects in Islamic cultures.
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Charlotte Fonrobert
Associate Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, of Classics and of German Studies
BioCharlotte Elisheva Fonrobert specializes in Judaism: talmudic literature and culture. Her interests include gender in Jewish culture; the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity; the discourses of orthodoxy versus heresy; the connection between religion and space; and rabbinic conceptions of Judaism with respect to GrecoRoman culture. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender(2000), which won the Salo Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies of that year and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Scholarship. She also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007), together with Martin Jaffee (University of Washington). Currently, she is working on a manuscript entitled Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and the Neighborhood.
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Hester Gelber
Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, of German Studies, Emerita
BioHester Gelber specializes in late medieval religious thought. She has taught courses on philosophy of religion as well as medieval Christianity. She has written extensively on medieval Dominicans, including: Exploring the Boundaries of Reason: Three Questions on the Nature of God by Robert Holcot OP and most recently It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford 1300-1350. She has now retired.
Professor Gelber received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin in 1974 and has taught at Stanford since 1978, beginning as a part-time lecturer in Philosophy before moving to Religious Studies in 1982. -
Fiona Griffiths
Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of Religious Studies and of German Studies
BioFiona Griffiths is a historian of medieval Western Europe, focusing on intellectual and religious life from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Her work explores the possibilities for social experimentation and cultural production inherent in medieval religious reform movements, addressing questions of gender, spirituality, and authority, particularly as they pertain to the experiences and interactions of religious men (priests or monks) with women (nuns and clerical wives). Griffiths is the author of Nuns' Priests' Tales: Men and Salvation in Medieval Women's Monastic Life,The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2018) and The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century, The Middle Ages Series (The University of Pennsylvania Press: 2007); she is co-editor (with Kathryn Starkey) of Sensory Reflections: Traces of Experience in Medieval Artifacts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019) and (with Julie Hotchin) of Partners in Spirit: Men, Women, and Religious Life in Germany, 1100-1500 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014). Her essays have appeared in Speculum, Early Medieval Europe, Church History, the Journal of Medieval History, postmedieval, and Viator. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). Griffiths is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America.
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Christopher Gurley
Ph.D. Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2022
BioChristopher Spencer Gurley, Jr is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University, where he specializes in American Religion and is pursuing a Ph.D. minor in history. His research explores the intersection of African American history and U.S. Catholic cultural life during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is specifically interested in the religio-racial histories of U.S. Catholicism, Black identity constructions, Catholicism in the rural south, and the socio-historical politics of class and belonging regarding Black masculinity and manhood.
Before joining the Stanford community, he studied U.S. History at Georgetown University as a Patrick Healy Fellow. Chris earned his undergraduate degree in Political Science from Tennessee State University and his Master of Theological Studies degree from Vanderbilt Divinity School. He also holds a Master of Arts in Religion degree from Yale Divinity School, where he was chosen to become an Elie Wiesel-Martin Luther King, Jr. scholar at Oxford University.
