Graduate Students
FAQ's for Incoming Graduate Students
The graduate program has three tracks. Short descriptions of the academic interests of graduate students in each area of emphasis are provided below:
Religion in the Americas
Fahaa Baden-Roberts.
M.A. student (from 2002).Fahaa received a B.A in Religion (summa cum laude) with a minor in Psychology from the University of Florida in 2000. Her undergraduate thesis focused upon the dynamics of Sufi Mysticism and Carl Gustav Jung's Analytical Psychology. Central to her graduate work is to consider how philosophies of substance and philosophies of events have affected modern thought. Her M.A. thesis will discuss Meister Eckhart's thought in relation to Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy. She plans to advance this project further in Ph.D work. Fahaa is a student member of the Instituite of Physics in England, American Institute of Physics, Eckhart Society, and Michael Polanyi Society. She is also a devoted wildlife rehabilitator and supporter of many conservation groups. fahaa@earthlink.net
Mallory K. Bolduc.
Ph.D. student (from 2007). Mallory graduated with honors from Texas Christian University with a B.A. in political science and religion. Her undergraduate thesis, which she presented at the Southwest Commission on Religious Studies, examined the Christian lobby for Israel in the United States and analyzed the effectiveness of this lobby under the George W. Bush administration. She also spent several months in Seville, Spain, where she studied interreligious dialogue and/or conflict under Muslim and Catholic rule. Her research interests deal primarily with the role of the Catholic hierarchy in Latin American regime transitions, especially on truth and reconciliation commissions in the Southern Cone. She is pursuing a minor in the Political Science department in order to focus on the "military moment" of Chile's transition to democracy and its lasting impact on democratic consolidation. mkbolduc@ufl.edu
Rose Caraway. Ph.D. candidate (from 2006). Ms. Caraway received a BA in Latin American Studies in 2003 from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2006, she received her MA in Latin American Studies from Tulane University in New Orleans. Her research interests include religion in Latin America, social movements, Christianity and globalization, and religious ethics. She is currently working with Dr. Virginia Garrard-Burnett at the University of Texas at Austin on a Templeton Foundation project entitled "Faces of God in Latin America," in which she focuses on contemporary Protestant movements in Cuba. rcaraway@ufl.edu
Jennifer Dick. M.A. student (From 2008). Jennifer received a B.A. in Anthropology, with a minor in Religion, from the University of Florida in 2007, graduating cum laude. Her undergraduate focus was in archaeology and African American religions. Her current research interests include plantation archaeology with a focus on how oppression and gender shape the meaning and practices of religion. gdick84@ufl.edu
Shreena N. Gandhi. Ph.D. candidate (from 2003). Shreena received her BA in Religion from Swarthmore College, where her major was religion and her thesis research centered on Buddhist religious narratives in Sri Lanka. In 2003 she received her Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. While at Harvard Divinity, she worked as a research assistant at the Center for Studies of World Religions, where her research focused on the religions of Iran. Shreena has started work on her dissertation, "Translating and Commodifying Yoga: From Transcendentalist Musings to Religious Market Staple". This dissertation combines her research interests which include religions of the Americas, Hinduism in the Diaspora, the study of material religion, and the relationship between capitalism and religion. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Kalamazoo College. Shreena.Gandhi@kzoo.edu
Janna Lafferty. Ph.D. student (from 2008). Janna received her B.A. in 2004 from the University of California, San Diego with dual majors in Cultural Anthropology and the Study of Religion, graduating cum laude, with honors and high distinction in the Anthropology department. The Anthropology department at UCSD also presented Janna with the A. Irving Hallowell award for excellence in sociocultural anthropology. She went on to complete an M.A. in the Religion Department at Duke University with a concentration in American Religion(s). Janna is broadly concerned with issues of theory and method in the academic study of religion and places her primary inquiries within the historical context of North America since the nineteenth century. She is interested in borderlands approaches to studying the American West and the way the rise of the nation-state in the U.S. has affected relations and modes of living in that space. Janna is interested in the ambiguous relationships between religion, capitalism, American tourism, and space, hoping particularly to study National Parks as religio-scapes imbued with various and competing forms of lived religion, power dynamics, and practices of identity formation. She is most particularly concerned with how these landscapes circumscribe political struggles of indigenous people regarding access to land and sacred sites vis-a-vis the interests of the U.S. nation-state. jannalauren@ufl.edu
Gayle Ann Spiers Lasater. Ph.D. candidate (from 2003).Ms. Lasater received a BA in Anthropology with a minor in International Relations at the University of West Florida, following this with an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and an emphasis in Sociology from Florida International University. Her academic interests include religion and politics in the Americas, western monotheism in the Atlantic New World, the interaction of Christian missions in the Americas, and religion and the environment. Ms. Lasater was a researcher with Ford Foundation's immigrant religion project, "Latino Immigrants in Florida: Lived Religion, Space, and Power,"working with principle investigator and religion department professor Manuel Vasquez. Ms. Lasater is writing her dissertation entitled Building the Kingdom: Mormon Missionaries and the Americas. glasater@ufl.edu
Sean O’Neil. Ph.D. candidate (from 2005). Sean received a BA in English and History from the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and holds a Masters in International Affairs--Latin American Studies from Ohio University. He taught high school levels of World and American history in Bogota, Colombia and from 2003 to 2005 Sean was an instructor of Spanish language and Latin American history at North Greenville University in Tigerville, South Carolina. At the University of Florida, he has taught introductory courses in Social Ethics and Christianity, and also teaches an undergraduate seminar in Religion, Pluralism and Identity in Latin America. His academic interests include social ethics; US Latino and Latin American religion; religion and globalization; religion and disability; and religion, film, and popular culture. He is currently conducting dissertation research on the influence of US Latino and Latin American Christianity on the reconfiguration of the Anglican Communion.soneil@ufl.edu
Leah Sarat. Ph.D. candidate (from 2006).Ms. Sarat received a BA in Comparative Cultures and Fine Art from Alfred University, and an MA in Religion and Culture from Wilfrid Laurier University. During an undergraduate semester in Nepal, she researched community formation among migrants to the KathmanduValley. After graduation, Ms. Sarat worked for two years as a resident volunteer at a women’s shelter in Ciudad Júarez, Mexico. During this time she assisted with the Border Awareness Program, introducing U.S. college students to the political and social realities of the border area. Her research interests include ritual, indigenous religions of the Americas, and the religious dimensions of U.S.-Mexico border crossing. Ms. Sarat has presented her work at the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion and is a contributor to The U.S.-Mexico Border: A Cultural and Political Encyclopedia.lsarat@ufl.edu
Hilit Surowitz. Ph.D. candidate (from 2004). Ms. Surowitz received an undergraduate degree from the University of Florida with a dual major in Religion and Political Science, and afterward, a Fulbright Fellowship to study the religious and social integration of Israel's Ethiopian Jewish community. She subsequently earned a master's degree from the department of religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and taught primary and secondary school in both Israel and South Florida. Her research interests include Caribbean religion, the Jewish communities of the Caribbean, and diaspora studies. She is particularly interested in the trans-Atlantic social and religious networks established and maintained by European, North African, and Caribbean Jewish communities and their role in defining community identity. hilit@ufl.edu
These Religion and Nature students have declared Religions of the Americas their secondary area: Gavin Van Horn, Samuel Snyder, Eleanor Finnegan, Bridgette O'Brien.
Religions of Asia
Phillip Green. Ph.D. student (from 2007).Mr. Green received an undergraduate degree in comparative religion from the University of Washington, and after living abroad in Japan for three years returned to earn a master's degree from the University of Florida in religion with an emphasis in early Indian Buddhism. His current academic research focuses on avadana literature, especially how images of women are portrayed and understood in a Buddhist collection of avadanas known as the Avadanasataka. He is also particularly interested in patterns of early Buddhist transmission and its connections with popular Buddhist narratives such as avadana and jataka tales. Phillip has also organized UF's first Sanskrit club in order to provide students of Sanskrit additional resources and peer support.psgreen@ufl.edu
Kendall Marchman. Ph.D. student (from 2008). Mr. Marchman received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from Mercer University and a Master of Theological Studies from Vanderbilt University. His main focus is Asian Buddhism, specifically its transmission and early development in China. His secondary interests include Hinduism, Vajrayana, Popular Religion, and Comic Books.krmarchman@ufl.edu
Caleb Simmons. Ph.D. student (from 2008). Caleb Simmons graduated from the Missouri State University (formerly Southwest Missouri State University) with a B.A. in Religious Studies. He received his master's degree from the Florida State University in Asian religious traditions with an emphasis in Hinduism (Thesis: She Who Slays the Buffalo Demon: Divinity, Identity, and Authority in Iconography of Mahishasuramardini). He has taught Religions of South Asia, Introduction to World Religions, and Asian Humanities at various institutions. Mr. Simmons has authored several encyclopedia articles covering a wide range of topics in South Asian History.simmons@ufl.edu
Jimi Wilson. M.A. student (from 2006). Mr. Wilson earned a BA in Philosophy and Religion and a BS in Mass Communications (with a concentration in journalism) at the University of North Carolina-Pembroke. His emphasis is in Hindu religious ethnography. As an undergraduate his research focused on practices among diasporic Hindus from the Sindh region (modern Pakistan). In addition to his ongoing interest in Sindhi Hinduism, he has recently been researching ways in which alternative music forms in the west—particularly punk rock—have incorporated Hindu religious concepts and have sometimes been used to promote various forms of Hinduism. jimi45@ufl.edu
Religion and Nature
Clint Bland. Ph.D. student (from 2008). Mr. Bland received a B.A. from Texas A&M University in 2006 where he majored in English literature and minored in history and film studies. In 2008, he completed an M.A. in religious studies at the University of Kansas where his thesis focused on critiquing the rehabilitation of theories of totemism and their application to the contemporary anti-whaling movement by scholars outside the field of religious studies. His current interests (which have yet to be whittled down) include studying the impact of environmental policies on marginalized religious communities, surveying creation care curriculum in seminary settings, the process of formulating or constructing theories of religion relative to radical environmentalism, the legal and cultural implications of increasing religious literacy in secondary public education, and narratives of isolation and spiritual awakening in the popularized stories of failed survivalists such as Timothy Treadwell and Christopher McCandless.ctbland@ufl.edu
Amy Brown. Ph.D. student (2008). Amy graduated from the University of Arkansas with a B.S. in Microbiology and a minor in Religious Studies. She received an M.S. in Natural Resources with a focus on environmental thought and culture from the University of Vermont. Her research interests include green or natural burial (environmentally-friendly funerals), evangelical conflict over climate change, ecofeminism and the role of eschatological thinking in Christian response to environmental devastation.amylbrown@ufl.edu
Eleanor Finnegan. Ph.D. candidate (from 2005).Eleanor Finnegan is a PhD Candidate in the Religion Department at the University of Florida. Ms. Finnegan received an undergraduate degree in religious studies with minors in economics and environmental studies from Colgate University and a Master of Theological Studies from Vanderbilt University with a focus on Islamic studies. Her scholarly interests include American Islam and Muslims, the impact of the Islamic tradition on environmental ethics and practices, and Muslim hip-hop music. The recipient of several Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for Modern Standard Arabic, Ms. Finnegan is a contributor to Environmental Ethics and the Encyclopedia of Environment and Society. She has presented research on American Muslims at national conferences, such as the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, the UNC/Duke Islamic Studies Conference, and the Florida State Graduate Student Symposium. Her dissertation is focused on farming among American Muslim communities. Her website is: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/finneged . finneged@ufl.edu
Robin F.
Globus. Ph.D. student (from 2008). Ms. Globus received her undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies from Dartmouth College, and her master's in Religion and Nature from UF's Department of Religion. Her thesis focused on the religious dimensions of apocalypticism associated with the environmental movement. For her dissertation she will examine the relationship between conservative Christians’ end time beliefs and their environmental attitudes and behavior. Strongly interested in cross-disciplinary communication and the role of the humanities in collaborative environmental research, she is also a fellow at the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program, an NSF-funded initiative that seeks to bring together interdisciplinary scholars together around the theme of water management. Ms. Globus works as Managing Editor and Subscriptions Manager for the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. She also serves as student member on the board of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. Her article "Environmental Millennialism," co-authored with Dr. Bron Taylor, will appear in the Oxford Handbook of Millennialism (2009). rglobus@ufl.edu
Jacob L. Jones. Ph.D. student(2008). J Jacob received his B.A. in Philosophy with a Religious Studies option from Montana State University in 2005. Then in 2008 he received his M.A. from University of Missouri. Throughout his M.A. studies Jacob focused on issues of power and new religious movements in America. His scholarly interests are in the role of nature in dialogues between various religious communities and nature and religion in everyday life in America.jljgv9@ufl.edu
Greg McElwain.
Ph.D. student (from 2007). Mr. McElwain received a B.A. in Biblical Text from Abilene Christian University and an M.T.S. in Ethics from Vanderbilt University. He is a Ph.D. minor in the Philosophy Department, and is broadly interested in philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and environmental philosophy. His more specific research interest is in environmental ethics, with a dissertation topic in the work of the British moral philosopher, Mary Midgley, and her theory of the “mixed community.” Mr. McElwain is a research assistant for the National Science Foundation “Ethics of Sustainability” grant, and is an editorial assistant for the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture.gmcelwain@ufl.edu
Todd LeVasseur. Ph.D. canditate (from 2006). Todd LeVasseur is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate in the Religion and Nature track. His dissertation work is a comparative study of religious communities that practice and support sustainable agriculture: Koinonia Partners, a Protestant lay monastic community in Americus, GA; and Congregation Shearith Israel, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue in Atlanta, GA and member of Hazon, a progressive national Jewish environmental group. His scholarly research reflects his interests in the interplay of religion, environmental and agrarian ethics, environmental science, and sustainable agriculture and how religions, especially in the U.S., are responding via lived environmental practices to the emerging climate crisis. Todd has been involved in interdisciplinary research on gender and watershed development in rural India and on environmental restoration with the Foundations of Conduct working group. Todd's scholarship on a variety of religion and nature issues can be seen in various self and co-authored book reviews and review essays, encyclopedia entries, and forthcoming articles in edited volumes. Lastly, Todd is passionate about teaching all aspects of religion to undergraduates. toddlev@ufl.edu
Bridgette O'Brien. Ph.D. candidate (from 2005). Ms. O'Brien earned an undergraduate degree in comparative world religions at the University of Puget Sound and a master's degree from the religion department at Columbia University where her studies focused on the religious traditions of Asia. Ms. O'Brien has taught high school for the past eight years. She worked with Harvard's Pluralism Project to educate students about the religious diversity in the Northwest and explored with her students how different religions addressed local environmental concerns in the Puget Sound area. Her professional interests include continued involvement with secondary school education where she aims to incorporate ideas about ecological literacy and outdoor/environmental education with people's religious understanding of the world through innovative curriculum units that contribute to broader education reforms. bridge72@ufl.edu
David Wiles. M.A. student (from 2003). Mr. Wiles received an M.A. in philosophy, focusing on environmental ethics, from Colorado State University. His main academic interests are bioregionalism, permaculture, and the idea that it is possible, productive, and personally rewarding for environmentalists to continue to "strive" despite the despair they might feel in their struggles to protect the environment. He is currently teaching at Alachua county community colleges, when not playing underwater hockey. dwiles@ufl.edu
Joseph Witt. Ph.D. candidate (from 2004). Mr. Witt received a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy and religion from Hendrix College in 2003. In 2006, he received his Master of Arts degree in religious studies from the University of Florida. His research considered the involvement of Celtic Christian and neo-pagan groups in environmental activism in the United Kingdom and Ireland, particularly surrounding the 2005 G8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland. Mr. Witt’s current research involves the study of religion and nature in the southern United States, primarily focusing on the influence of religions in environmental activism, including issues of mountaintop removal, deforestation and chip-mills, National Forest and parkland uses, and environmental justice. He is a contributor to the journal Worldviews and, with Bron Taylor, Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in America. Mr. Witt is also the Assistant Editor for the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. joseph23@ufl.edu
