The Department is delighted to congratulate its students, faculty and alumni on their accomplishments:

October 29, 2009: Joseph Alexander Snow successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, "Listening to Places: A Comparative Study of Zen, Sufism, and Cosmology" (directed by Prof. Joanne P. Waghorne).

October 29, 2009: Dorina Parmenter successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, "The Iconic Book: The Image of the Christian Bible in Myth and Ritual" (directed by Prof. James W. Watts).

October 23, 2009: Edward Mooney (Professor of Religion and Philosophy) has written Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy From Thoreau to Cavell, now published by Continuum.

October 7, 2009: Prof. Joanne Waghorne attended the opening party and preview of "Maharaja" The Splendour of India's Royal Courts" at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.  She contributed "The Power of Public Splendour" to the accompanying volume Maharaja: The Splendour of India's Royal Courts edited by curators Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer and published by the museum. 

October 7, 2009.  Juliana Finucane, after successfully defending her dissertation "When Bodhisattvas of the Earth Become Global Citizen's: Soka Gakkai in Comparative Perspective" (advisor JP Waghorne) arrived in Singapore to take up her new position as a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore.

September 23, 2009: Juliana Finucane successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, "When Bodhisattvas of the Earth become Global Citizens: Soka Gakkai in Comparative Perspective" (directed by Prof. Joanne P. Waghorne).

July 23, 2009: Diana Walsh Pasulka (Ph.D. 2003) has won a five-year, $1.6 million Teaching American History grant. The grant will fund a joint initiative between UNC Wilmington, where Pasulka is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, and the school districts of three local counties to "instruct teachers in traditional American history and how religion has affected that history" (for more, see the Star News, http://www.starnewsonline.com/article/20090723/ARTICLES/907234003).

July, 2009: Edward Mooney (Professor of Religion and Philosophy) edited Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard: Philosophical Engagements , published by Indiana University Press in the Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion.

July 1, 2009: Dean George Langford has appointed James W. Watts (Professor of Religion) to chair the Department of Religion from 2009-2012.

June, 2009: John D. Caputo (Thomas J. Watson Professor) and Linda Martín Alcoff edited St. Paul Among the Philosophers, the papers from the 2005 Postmodernism, Culture and Religion Conference at Syracuse University, now published by Indiana University Press in the Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion.

May, 2009: Hasan Kaplan (Ph.D. 2005) has published his dissertation under the title, Psychology of New Muslim Identity in America: Psychosocial Study of the Identity Formation of the Second Generation Muslim Adolescents in the USA (VDM Verlag, 2009). Hasan is Assistant Professor of Psychology & Religion at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Turkey.

May 26, 2009: Marcia Robinson (Assistant Professor of Religion) has been awarded tenure in the Religion Department in the College of Arts and Sciences.

May 12, 2009: Olga Solovieva successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation, “Asceticism and Allegory: Exegesis as an Ascetic Performance” (directed by Prof. Patricia Cox Miller). Olga will be a Visiting Professor at Skidmore College next year.

April 30, 2009: Benjamin Stahlberg successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, “Spinoza's Philosophy of Divine Order” (directed by Prof. Zachary Braiterman). Ben is a Visiting Professor at Colgate University.

April 27, 2009: Marc Beard successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, “Writing Holiness, Writing Violence: Suffering and the Construction of Female Sanctity” (directed by Prof. Patricia Cox Miller). Marc is Visiting Professor at Gettysburg College.

April 16, 2009: Svetlana Peshkova (Visiting Professor of Religion 2007-2009) will this fall become Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH). She has also won a fellowship for 2009 -2010 at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson center (Washington, DC).

April 14, 2009: Clayton Crockett (Ph.D. 1997) won the Outstanding Faculty Award for 2008-2009 in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Central Arkansas, where he is Associate Professor and Director of Religious Studies.

April 6, 2009: Gustav Niebuhr (Associate Professor of Religion and the Media) received the Unitarian Universalist Association's Frederic G. Melcher Book Award for Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America (Viking Penguin, 2008).  For more, see http://sunews.syr.edu/story_details.cfm?id=5921.

March 23, 2009: Carson Webb (Ph.D. student) won the Albert Clark Award for best graduate paper from Theta Alpha Kappa, the national honor society for religious studies and theology.
                     
February 18, 2009: Gerry Beritela successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, “Guru Love: On the Tropes of Eroticism in the Spiritual Relationship between Master and Disciple” (directed by Prof. Ann Gold). Gerry is an episcopal priest and teaches part time at LeMoyne College.

February 9, 2009: Heath Atchley (Ph.D. 2001) has written Encountering the Secular: Philosophical Endeavors in Religion and Culture, now published by the University of Virginia Press. Heath teaches at Western New England College and Mount Holyoke College.

February, 2009: Patricia Cox Miller published The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

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