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.

Students

Ates Altinordu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Yale University. He works in the areas of religion and politics, secularization, immigrant incorporation, and citizenship. His dissertation titled “Religious Politics: Political Catholicism and Political Islam in Comparison” comparatively analyzes late-19th/early-20th century political Catholicism in Germany and post-1970 political Islam in Turkey. His most recent publication is “After Secularization?” (with Philip S. Gorski), Annual Review of Sociology, vol.34 (2008), 55-85.

Sarah Cieglo - As a PhD candidate in the Yale History Department, I am currently undertaking research for my dissertation, entitled “Conscience, Morality, and Pastoral Divinity: the Transformation of English Religion, 1650-1730.” For this project, I will investigate changes in English pastoral divinity from 1650 to 1730, focusing on changes in pastoral theology and the practice of spiritual care. This project will trace change over time in the thought and practice of Church of England, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Catholic clergymen. My aim will be to explain the transition to a focus on morality and moral behavior which occurred during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and to trace the political and social implications of this change. The first part of my project will address changes in pastoral theology, and the second part will investigate changes in pastoral practice.

I have also worked on projects involving the use and translation of St. Augustine’s works in early seventeenth century England and on the use of publishing in conflicts amongst members of the Westminster Assembly of Divines during the English Civil War. I am particularly interested historical investigations of secularization, the relationship between religion and politics, and the causes behind change in religious practices.

My major teaching fields are “Early Modern Britain,” “Religion in Early Modern Europe,” and “Colonial America.”

Shawn Fraistat is a second year Ph.D. student in Political Science. He has a B.A. in Government and Politics and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Maryland College Park, and an M.Sc. in Political Theory from the London School of Economics. He is specializing in political philosophy, and is particularly interested in liberalism, religion and politics, and meta-ethics.

Adam Grogg, from Frederick County, Virginia, is a first year student at Yale Law School. He graduated from Williams College in 2004 with a degree in Political Science and Economics, and completed an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at Oxford University in 2006 with a thesis on the politics of education reform. Adam is particularly interested in understanding and advocating the potential of incorporating faith-based movements in a progressive agenda for American politics.

Khurram Hussain is a fourth year PhD. student in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. His academic interests include the study of secularism, nationalism, religious identity formation, and the political ethics of modern citizenship. His research has so far focused on the religious and political history of the Indian sub-continent in the 19th and 20th centuries. He has also worked extensively on the history of different modern accounts of Secularism. His dissertation will focus on the political dynamics of religious resentment in the modern age.

Andy Junker is a graduate student in the Sociology Department. He holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Religious Studies from Indiana University. His analytical interests are in religion, culture, politics, and social theory and regional interests focus on China and Japan. Prior to coming to Yale, Andy had studied, researched, or worked in Japan, China, Thailand, Nepal and India, including one year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. His foreign language training is in Chinese and Japanese. At Yale, Andy’s research has concentrated on new religious groups, nationalism, and late imperial China as a site for historical sociological inquiry.

Kristine J. Kalanges is a third year student at Yale Law School and a Ph.D. candidate in International Relations at Georgetown University. She has a B.A. in International Political Economy from the University of Puget Sound (where she was an Honors Program Scholar in the Classics), and a M..A in Government from Georgetown. Her research interests include political philosophy, religion and politics, international relations theory, political economy, international and comparative law, and theology (especially Radical Orthodoxy). Kristine’s dissertation research is a comparative constitutional analysis of religious freedom in the West and the Middle East, with special emphasis on the theological roots of legal principles and historical institutionalism. She is also developing an incarnational political theology of international relations.

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.

Paul Pinto is broadly interested in the impact of social institutions and culture on the formation, maintenance and destruction of political order. A second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Political Science, Pinto focuses on the relationship between religion, social organization and war, particularly with regard to processes of conversion, conquest and settlement and religious war. His main geographic and temporal areas of specialization are early modern Europe and America.

Lani Rowe is a Ph.D. student in Political Science and the student coordinator for The MacMillan Center Initiative on Religion, Politics, and Society colloquium. She received a B.A. in Politics from the University of California at Santa Cruz and graduated with both departmental highest honors and college honors. Committed to interdisciplinary synthesis, she is currently researching the concept of holy war in the Judo-Christian tradition and also hopes to reinvigorate political philosophy with a psycho-social reconsideration of its religious inheritance and implications.

Angelika Schlanger is a first-year Phd student in the Political Science Department. 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. Her senior theses centered on the debate on the "Jewish Question" in France, just prior to the Revolution. Her historical research and employment at a civil rights agency devoted to separation of church and state and religious pluralism, inspired her interest in the study of political science, and specifically, in the intersection of religion and politics.

Courtney Thomas is a doctoral student in Renaissance Studies and History at Yale. She holds a B.A. honors degree and an M.A. in history, both from the University of Alberta. Courtney's primary area of focus is European history during the early modern period, with special attention to British history. She is interested in the dynamic and dialectical relationship between religion and politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and how these two spheres of thought and action profoundly impacted society and culture during the period between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.

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.

Kenneth Townsend, from Kosciusko, Mississippi, is a first-year student pursuing a joint degree in Yale's Law School and Divinity School. He graduated from Millsaps College in 2004 with a BA in English and Political Science and received an MPhil in Political Theory from Oxford University in 2006. From 2006-2008, Kenneth taught political theory and ethics at the University of Mississippi. As a student of law and theology, Kenneth is looking forward to exploring further liberalism's relationship with religion – particularly questions of religious accommodation and, in the American context, free exercise jurisprudence. As a member of the United Methodist Church, he is also interested in learning more about the role of faith in promoting social justice.

Peter Verovsek is a first year PhD student in Political Science with interests in International Relations, Political Theory, Comparative Politics, and Qualitative Research Methods. He holds an AB (Summa cum Laude) from Dartmouth College in Government (High Honors) and German Studies, where he worked on theoretical models of identity and the role of dialogue in pluralist societies. Before coming to Yale, he spent a year on a Student Fulbright Grant to the Republic of Slovenia, where he conducted research on how memories of violence and civil war during World War II have been constructed and revised in Europe by different ethnic, national and religious groups, with a focus on the former Yugoslavia and its relations with Italy. His is interested in how and why memories of conflict diverge and evolve in different societal groups over time, affecting both domestic and inter-state relations. His current research is focused on developing a conception of political memory as the basis for a broader research program in the study of politics.

Molly Worthen is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies. She received a B.A. in History from Yale in 2003, where she studied diplomatic history, Russian language, and theology. She published her first book, The Man On Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill (Houghton Mifflin) in 2006, and has written about religion for the New Republic and the New York Times Magazine. Her research interests include American evangelicalism, higher education, intellectual history, and monasticism. She is a Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellow.

Jessica Wrobleski grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia and graduated from the College of William & Mary with a B.A. in religious studies. She is currently a 6th year graduate student in the department of religious studies, focusing on Christian theological and social/political ethics. Her dissertation, "The Limits of Hospitality", draws upon theological sources in order to consider the requisite conditions for the practice of hospitality and the implications for issues such as immigration, communal identity, and the separation of personal and public ethics.