Other S.U. Faculty with Research & Teaching Interests in Religion

Donna E. Arzt		(J.D., Harvard Law School, 1979; LL.M., Columbia University, 1988), Professor, College of Law, and Director of the Center for Global Law and Practice. Donna Arzt teaches public international law, comparative constitutional law, international human rights and refugee law. Her current research interests include the Middle East peace process, refugee law, religious freedom, humanitarian intervention and Islamic law. She has published extensively in the field of human rights law and is author of the Council on Foreign Relations Press book, Refugees Into Citizens: Palestinians and the End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Carol Babiracki		(Ph.D., University of Illinois 1991) Associate Professor of Fine Arts. Prof. Babiracki specializes in teaching and research on Musicology and Ethnomusicology, especially South Asian music and dance, ethnic and immigrant music and dance in the U.S., music of the Middle East. Her research focuses on the interplay of gender, religion and dance in the tribal music of India.
Michael Barkun		(Ph.D., Northwestern), Professor of Political Science. Prof. Barkun's research interests include religion and politics, millennialism, political violence, and international law. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Religion and the Racist Right (1994 and 1997), Crucible of the Millennium (1986), Disaster and the Millennium (1974 and 1986), and Law Without Sanctions (1968). Prof. Barkun serves on the editorial boards of Terrorism and Political Violence and Nova Religio and has participated in joint activities between the FBI and the American Academy of Religion.
Frederick Beiser		(D.Phil., Oxford University, 1981), Professor of Philosophy. Prof. Beiser's research focuses on the history of modern philosophy, especially the history of German philosophy (Kant and German idealism) and the English Enlightenment, including the philosophy of religion in these periods. He has written The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (1987), Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism (1992), and The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment (1996).
Mehrzad Boroujerdi		(Ph.D., The American University, 1990), Associate Professor of Political Science. Professor Boroujerdi's research interests focus on the intellectual history of the contemporary Middle East, and Third-World resistance to modernity and cultural globalization. He is the author of Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism (1996).
John Burdick		(Ph.D., City University of New York, 1990), Associate Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts (PARC) and Director of the Syracuse Social Movements Initiative (SSMI). His publications include Blessed Anastacia: Women, Race and Popular Christianity in Brazil (1998) and Looking for God in Brazil (1993). His current research interests include assessing the effects on Brazilian popular culture of pentecostalsim and the progressive Catholic Church.
Laurinda Dixon		(Ph.D., Boston University, 1980), Professor of Fine Arts. Prof. Dixon's research focuses on interdisciplinary investigations of art and its many contexts, especially the relationship of pre-Enlightenment art and science. Her books and articles include studies of alchemical imagery in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and the relationship of gynecological medical imagery to the social and intellectual roles and expectations of women.
Alexander Fernández		(M.Architecture, Syracuse, 1987) Assistant Professor of Architecture, DIPA Florence. Prof. Fernández currently teaches in the Florence program, where he continues an in-depth study of Carthusian monasteries and their relationship to religious rituals.
Wayne Franits		(Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1987) Associate Professor of Fine Arts. Prof. Franits is the author of Paragons of Virtue: Women and Domesticity in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art (1993), and the editor of Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered (1997) and The Cambridge Companion to Vermeer (2001). His interests include the representation of biblical themes in seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art.
Fred M. Frohock		(Ph.D., North Carolina), Professor of Political Science. Prof. Frohock's academic concentrations are political philosophy, law and bioethics. His nine books include Healing Powers (1992), a study of alternative medicine and spiritual healing, and Lives of the Psychics (2000), which is an examination of various claims for alternative realities and the implications of these claims for scientific and religious discourses.
Michael Gaddis		(Ph.D., Princeton University, 1999), Assistant Professor of History. Prof. Gaddis' research and teaching interests focus on religion in the Late Roman, Late Antique and Early Medieval periods. He is also interested in the comparative and cross-cultural study of religious violence and extremism, from ancient times to the present. His forthcoming book is titled There is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire.
Susan Henderson		(Ph.D., Columbia University, 1989), Associate Professor of Architecture. Prof. Henderson's fields of teaching are modern architectural history, the history of Islamic architecture and urban history. Her research area is early modern architecture in northern Europe.
Eric Holzwarth		(Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1985), Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Deputy Director of the Honors Program, 306 Browne Hall. Prof. Holzwarth teaches courses in Christianity and in Religion and Culture.
Gregg Lambert		(Ph.D., University of California at Irvine, 1995), Assistant Professor of English. Prof. Lambert teaches and does research in the ares of Comparative Literature and Theory. His books are Report to the Academy: The New Conflict of the Faculties (2000), and The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (2001).
Joseph M. Levine		(Ph.D., Columbia University, 1965), Distinguished Professor of History. Some of Prof. Levine's books include: Between the Ancients and the Moderns: Baroque Culture in Restoration England (1999) and The Autonomy of History: Truth and Method from Erasmus to Gibbon (1999). Among his current projects is The Trial of the Witnesses: History and Religion in Early Modern England.
Meredith Lillich		(Ph.D., Columbia University, 1969), Professor of Fine Arts. Prof. Lillich's areas of interest include medieval monasticism; the medieval church art (esp. stained glass), iconography, liturgy, theology, history, organization. Her books include: The Queen of Sicily & Gothic Stained Glass in Mussy & Tonnerre (1998); The Armor of Light: Stained Glass in Western France 1250-1325 (1994); Rainbow Like an Emerald: Stained Glass in Lorraine in the 13th & Early 14th Centuries (1991); The Stained Glass of Saint-Pere de Chartres (1978). Her current research is on Reims Cathedral.
Dennis McCort		(Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1970) Associate Professor of German. Prof. McCort's interests include literature and psychology; literature and religion, esp. East-West relations; Romanticism, Buddhism, and Zen. He has written Going Beyond the Pairs: The Coincidence of Opposites in German Romanticism, Zen, and Deconstruction (2001) and States of Unconsciousness in Three Tales by C. F. Meyer (1988).
Micere Githae Mugo		(Ph.D., University of New Brunswick, 1973) Professor of African American Studies. Dr. Mugo's research interests include Orature, Literature, Theater, Creative Writing, Pan African Studies, Education, Women and Developmental Issues. Her undergraduate education covered studies in Philosophy and Religion, including African Indigenous Religions and Islam, in which she still retains a scholarly interest. Her major book publications are: My Mother's Poem and Other Songs, African Orature and Human Rights, Visions of Africa, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi (with Ngugi wa Thiong'o), Daughter of My People, Sing! and The Long Illness of Ex-Chief Kiti. She has also co-edited eight supplementary readers for Zimbabwean schools.
Gary Radke		(Ph.D., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1980) Professor of Fine Arts. Prof. Radke's books include an architectural monograph, Viterbo: Profile of a Thirteenth-Century Papal Palace, and Art in Renaissance Italy, a university-level textbook co-authored with John T. Paoletti. His current research focuses upon the patronage of the Benedictine nuns of San Zaccaria in Renaissance Venice.
Dennis Romano		(Ph.D., Michigan State University, 1981), Professor of History. Prof. Romano teaches and does research on early modern Europe, Renaissance Italy, and especially Venice. He has written Housecraft of Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1600 (1996) and Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State (1987). His current research focuses on the biography of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1423-1457, and envy in Late Medieval & Renaissance Italy.
Maureen Trudelle Schwarz		(Ph.D., University of Washington, 1995), Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Prof. Schwarz is a cultural anthropologist whose area of specialization is Native North America. She has written Molded in the Image of Changing Woman: Navajo Views on the Human Body and Personhood (1997) and Navajo Lifeways: Contemporary Issues, Ancestral Knowledge (2001). She recently finished a book about Navajo women who are ceremonial practitioners Blood and Voice: The Apprenticeship and Practice of Navajo Female Ceremonial Practitioners based on interviews with women who do a wide variety of healing and prophylactic ceremonies.
Milton C. Sernett		(Ph.D., University of Delaware, 1972), Professor of African American Studies and History. Prof. Sernett's principal areas of teaching and research are African American religious history, the American South, the abolitionist movement, and American social reform movements. He is the editor of African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness (1999), the author of Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (1997), and he is working on a book to be called Harriet Tubman & the American Memory: the Forging of an American Icon.
John Scott Strickland		(Ph.D., University of North Carolina, 1984), Associate Professor of History. Prof. Strickland's interests focuse on the American South, African American religion and culture, United States social history, 1700-1900. He has written Millennial Visions and Visible Congregations: Conversion, Community, and the Culture of Resistance Among South Carolina Slaves (1996).
Heidi Swarts		(Ph.D., Cornell, 2001), Assistant Professor of Political Science. Prof. Swarts's fields of interests are American social movements, religion and politics, and American political thought and culture. Her dissertation is titled "Moving without a Movement: Organized Churches and Neighborhoods in American Politics."
Laurence Thomas		(Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh), Professor of Philosophy and of Political Science. Professor Thomas is the author of Living Morally: A Psychology of Moral Character (1989),Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust (1993), Sexual Rights and Human Orientation with Michael Levin (1999), and numerous articles in moral theory and social philosophy.
Margaret Susan Thompson		(Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1979), Associate Professor of History. Prof. Thompson teaches and does research on national politics, religion and politics, and the Catholic Church. She is the author of The Spider Web: Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (1985), and serves as a special consultant to the National Coalition of American Nuns.
Robert J. Thompson		(Ph.D., Northwestern, 1987), Professor, Newhouse School, and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television. Prof. Thompson is the author or editor of Television's Second Golden Age (1996), Prime Time, Prime Movers (1992), Adventures on Prime Time (1990), Making Television (1990), and Television Studies (1989). He has written on the depiction of religion in television and is currently working on a history of television.
Susan S. Wadley		(Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1973), Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies and Anthropology. Prof. Wadley's research has focused on popular religion, oral traditions, and public culture resulting in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia (1995) and Oral Epics in India (1989). Her interests currently focus on three topics: cultural change in rural India as it responds to globalization; the relationship of social change to patterns of education, of fertility, of female-specific mortality, and women's status more generally; and an oral epic, Dhola, sung in the Braj regions of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.