People

Carlos M. N. Eire Riggs
Professor of History and Religious Studies
Office: HGS 203
Phone: (203) 432-1357
Email: carlos.eire@yale.edu

Professor Eire, who received his PhD from Yale in 1979, specializes in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a strong focus on both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations; the history of popular piety; and the history of death. He is the author of War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin (1986); From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain (1995); and co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: An Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997). He has also ventured into the twentieth century and the Cuban Revolution in Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), which won the National Book Award in Nonfiction, 2003.

Bryan Garsten
Assistant Professor of Political Science
8 Prospect Place, Room 109
Phone: 436-3696
Email: bryan.garsten@yale.edu

Bryan Garsten received his Ph.D. from the Government Department at Harvard University, and taught at Williams College before coming to Yale. He writes about the history of political thought and contemporary political theory, with a special interest in the themes of persuasion and rhetoric, political representation and judgment, and religion. His first book, Saving Persuasion: a defense of rhetoric and judgment (Harvard 2006), earned the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press for the best manuscript in any field submitted by a first-time author. During the current academic year Garsten will teach courses on democratic rhetoric, representation, and the history of modern political thought.

Philip S. Gorski
Professor of Sociology;
Director of the Center for Comparative Research

Phillip Gorski received his B.A. from Harvard University and his PhD from UC Berkeley. He is the author of The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2003) and co-editor of Max Weber’s Economy and Society: A Critical Companion (Stanford University Press, 2005). The principal focus of his research is on religion and politics in comparative and historical perspective. Current projects include an edited volume entitled “Bourdieusian Theory and Historical Analysis”, a book manuscript entitled “Religious America? Secular Europe?” and papers on post-secularism, religious nationalism, and critical realism.

Sigrun Kahl
Assistant Professor - Political Science
8 Prospect Place, Room 141
Phone: 203-432-0280
Email: sigrun.kahl@yale.edu

Sigrun Kahl received her PhD from Humboldt University (Berlin, Germany) in 2006. She is interested in how religion became embedded into the institutions of the modern state, in particular how religion has influenced poverty policy and the welfare state. Her dissertation, “Saving the Poor: How Religion Shapes Welfare-to-Work Policy in Europe and the United States” shows the developmental ties between historically dominant Christian denominations (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist/Puritan) and contemporary welfare-to-work strategies in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Germany. Publications: “The Religious Roots of Modern Poverty Policy: Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed Protestant Traditions Compared,” in: European Journal of Sociology (Archives Européennes de Sociologie) Vol. 45, 1 (2005), pp. 91-126; and “Religious Social Doctrines and Poor Relief: A Different Causal Pathway,” forthcoming in: Kees van Kersbergen and Philip Manow (eds.): Religion, Class Coalitions, and Welfare State Regimes, Cambridge University Press. Courses she teaches include “Welfare States across Nations” and “Religion and Politics.”

Vivek Sharma
Assistant Professor - Political Science
8 Prospect Place, Room 103
Phone: 432-3828
Email: vivek.sharma@yale.edu

Vivek Sharma, Ph.D., New York University, 2005. He is broadly interested in the relationship between social institutions and political order including alliances, warfare and violence. To this end he is working on several projects that examine property, kinship, military organization and political authority (both secular and ecclesiastical) in the history of Europe. His dissertation explores the genesis and implications of the emergence in medieval Europe of dynastic social institutions.

Post-doctoral fellow

Anne Mark Nielsen
Postdoctoral visiting fellow
Tlf: 202-492-8290
Email: anne.nielsen@yale.edu

Anne Mark Nielsen received her PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) in 2010. She is interested in immigration issues broadly and immigrant integration, integration laws and policies in particular. With point of departure in the Rushdie affair, the Theo van Gogh affair in the Netherlands, and the Danish cartoon crisis, her dissertation critically evaluates the ability of secularization theories to explain the function of religion in these conflicts, and argues for a greater focus on the function of religion as a powerful source for developing protest identities and as a social mobilisor among first and second generation Muslim immigrants in political fights over recognition and accommodation. She is currently conducting a comparative study of state accommodation of religious pluralism and religious minorities focusing on France, Denmark and the US.   

Junior Fellows

Teresa Bejan is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Yale specializing in political theory and the history of political thought.  She holds degrees from the Universities of Chicago and Cambridge, and during the 2010-2011 academic year she returned to Cambridge as a Fox Fellow at Sidney Sussex College. Her principal research interests lie in the political and religious thought of early modern England and America, particularly concerning issues of religious toleration, civility, and civic education. She has published articles in the Oxford Review of Education and History of European Ideas, and her essay on the educational thought of Thomas Hobbes is forthcoming in Ideas of Education: Philosophical and Political Perspectives from Plato to the 19th century (Routledge). She is a founding member of the editorial board for the The Art of Theory, an online journal of political philosophy, and is currently finishing work on her dissertation, “Mere Civility: Practicing Toleration in 17th c. England and New England”.

Carmen Dege is a PhD student in Political Science with a specific focus on political theory and comparative politics. She graduated from Freie Universität Berlin in 2009 with a degree in Political Science and Psychology, and completed the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago in 2010 with a thesis on the history, politics and ethics of Zionism. Carmen is particularly interested in understanding the beginnings of the philosophy of the other in 18th and 19th century Europe and the extent to which it has provoked different “ethical turns” in French and German contemporary political philosophy.

Jeffrey Guhin is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at Yale University. His dissertation is a comparison of two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools in the New York City area, asking how these communities use prayer, scripture, and science  as "moral technologies" to solve everyday problems and mediate their relationships with the larger world.  His research interests include the sociology of education, the sociology of religion, and science and technology studies, and he has published on the nature of irony in the United States, religious environmentalism, and post-colonial sociology. 

John Hartley is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at Yale University.  He also holds a B.A. in International Relations from UC Davis (honors and special recognition) and an M.A. in Iranian History (distinction) from the University of Isfahan, Iran. John’s analytical interests are in religion, culture and politics, religio-secular relations, conservative interfaith relations, globalization, secularization, and social theory.  Prior to coming to Yale, John had studied, researched, or worked in Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire.  His foreign language training is in Persian, Turkish, French and Spanish.At Isfahan, John did archival and oral historical research on socio-cultural change in the Isfahan Bazaar during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.  His work gave special attention to the interpenetration of religious and secular fields in the commercial system. At Yale, John’s dissertation tentatively titled “Religious Exclusivists taking Inclusive Action” comparatively analyzes recent transnational relations between conservative Muslims and Christians in the US, Middle East and Southeast Asia. John uses mixed methods of historical event, narrative, survey and social network analysis to explore the interaction between theological belief, social orientation and politics in the public action of religious leaders.John’s other projects at Yale investigate the political communication of Iranian presidents at the United Nations, symbolic boundary formation in the international community, the limits of tolerance, and the role of regional “experts” in public diplomacy and discourse.  John is also affiliated with the Yale Center for Comparative Research, the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and the Yale Council on Middle East Studies. 

Anna Jurkevics is a Ph.D. student at the Yale department of political science, where she is focusing on political theory. Her research follows in the tradition of critical theory and explores themes in political and legal theory as they inform current debates on territorial jurisdictions and the politics of borders. Prior to Yale, Anna received a B.A. in German and Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Samuel Loncar is a first year Philosophical Theology PhD student in Religious Studies. His research focuses on modern theology and philosophy, particularly in the post-Kantian tradition. Interested in the theological and philosophical foundations of modernity, his political concerns center on the philosophical coherence of modern institutions, like the secular state, and how or whether their perceived legitimacy is related to the decline of metaphysics in modernity.

William MacMillan is a graduate student in sociology. His Research Interests include the intersection of religion, culture, and politics; faith and globalization; the sociology of knowledge; social theory; the philosophy of social science; and comparative-historical sociology.

Sam Nelson is a doctoral candidate in sociology at Yale. His research interests include transnational religion, overseas missionary movements, and Protestant revivalism. His dissertation focuses on the political and organizational conditions of inter-confessional and international religious movements in European and North-American Protestantism in the early eighteenth century.

Angelika Schlanger is a third-year Phd student in the Political Science Department and the Student Coordinator for the Religion and Politics Colloquium. She received her BA at the University of Pennsylvania, with university and departmental honors in French and Intellectual History, and an MA in Political Science at Columbia University. At Penn, she did original archival research on the pre-revolutionary debate on the "Jewish Question" in France. Her current research seeks to explain the variation in the extent to which Western European states accommodate the religious rights and needs of Muslim and other religious minorities. She is also exploring how European states “manage” religion through the requirement of formal recognition and the normative implications of this practice. Her work intersects the subfields of political theory and comparative politics.

Samuel Stabler is second-year graduate student in Sociology. He received his BA at The University of Washington, with honors. Sam’s interests revolve around the secularization debates, with an emphasis on religion in the United States. His work strives to connect the contours of policy regimes and institutions directed at religion, to broader patterns in religious, political, and moral practice across time.

Luke Thompson is a first year graduate student in the Department of Political Science. He holds a BA in American Studies, English, History, and Political Science from the University of Kansas. His research interests include political theory, the history of political thought, democratic ideology, and the relationship between religion and politics.

Gulay Turkmen is a Sociology Ph.D. candidate. Her research interests include sociology of religion, comparative-historical sociology, nations/nationalism and cultural trauma and collective memory in the context of national identity formation. She is specifically interested in the ways religious and nationalist identities intersect, intertwine and compete with each other, especially in the Middle East. Currently she's doing research on religion as a supra-national identity. Her dissertation proposal is titled "United in Religion, Divided by Ethnicity: An Analysis of the Role of Supranational Religious Identities in Ethno-Nationalist Conflicts.

Luke Wagner is a PhD student in Sociology at Yale. He has a B.A. in Political and Social Thought and an M.A. in Religious Studies, both from the University of Virginia. His academic interests are in political sociology, religion and politics, secularism, political economy, and cultural identity. His research is on the forms and formations of democratic cultures and the role of religion in political transitions. His research is focused geographically on South Asia, with an emphasis on the Himalayan region and Nepal, in particular.