Recent Dissertations

2023

  • Olivia Bustion: Autonomy and the Bonds of Love
  • Derek Buyan: We Believe these Truths: American Democracy’s Humanistic Political Ethic of Belief
  • Allison Kanner-Botan: Maddening Love: Islamic Thought and the Politics of Desire in the Legend of Layla and Majnun 
  • Nadia Khan: American Muslim Tarbiya: Parents, Experts, ʿUlamāʾ, and Debates about Mothering
  • Mendel Kranz: The Postcolonial Jewish Question: Jewish and Arab Entanglements in Postwar France
  • Christina Llanes: The Darkness in Christ's Eyes: The Incarnational Theology of Divine Union in Angela of Foligno's Memorial
  • Elsa Marty: Contesting Context: Adivasi Theology and the Indeterminacy of Context
  • Kyohei Mikawa: The Cunning of Buddhahood: An Omnitelic Reconception of
    Teleology in Tiantai Buddhist Thought
  • Dhruv Nagar: Thinking Spi | Ritually: Grammar, Action & Embodiment In and
    Before Advaita
  • Diane Picio: A Series of Family Resemblances: Interrogating Hollywood's Trope of the US-American Family
  • Foster Pinkney: Rending the Veil: Blackness as Dignity Constructed through the Works of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois.
  • Justin Smolin: The Mirror of Realities: The Translation of Religious Difference in Early Modern South Asia
  • Bruce Winkelman: Genealogies of Japanese Buddhism: The Institutional Politics of Founder Centrism in Early Medieval Japan

2022

  • Ahmed Arafat: The Surah as Argumentation: The Early Study of the Surah Structure in the Exegesis of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210)
  • Joel Brown: Preparing the Way: African American Club Women and Social Christianity in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
  • Nicholas Buck: Alienation and Political Belonging in Rousseau, Hegel, Du Bois, and King
  • Samuel Catlin: The Rest is Literature: Midrash and the Institution of "Theory" in America
  • Jetsun Deleplanque: Visions of Theocracy: The Rise of Ecclesiastical Power in Tibet and the Founding of the Bhutanese State.
  • Nathan Hardy: Signs of Life: Late Ancient Christianity, Narrative, and the Paradox of Living Images
  • Joseph Haydt: Revelation and Thought: A Study in the Age of Goethe
  • Lee (Doug) Hoffer: Covenants Human and Divine: Paul's argumentum a minore ad maius in Gal 3:15-17 and Its Relevance to Gal 3-4.
  • Adam Miller: To Feel Like We Feel: Reading the Precious Banner Sūtra as Affective Regime
  • Anil Mundra: No Identity without Diversity:  Haribhadrasūri’s Anekāntavāda as a Jain Response to Doctrinal Difference
  • Hyein Park: Comparative Mystical Theology of Love and Emptiness: Nondual Union in Buddhists and Beguines
  • John Marc Sianghio: Can Might Make Rights? Dialogical Ethics and Cultural Value Formation in Armed Humanitarian Intervention
  • Paride Stortini: Reimagining India between Science and Religion. Indology and Modernity in Japanese Buddhism

2021

  • Sun Bok Bae: Ethics and Morality in the Priestly Law Narrative
  • Seema Chauhan: (Mis)Understanding Hinduism: Representations of Hinduism in Jaina Purāṇas
  • Matthew Creighton: The Hidden Father and the Problem of Generations in Luther, Freud, and Kafka
  • Emily Crews: Conceiving the Self: The Female Reproductive Body and the Birth of the Religious Person in Nigerian Pentecostalism in Chicago
  • Peter Faggen: Contested Authority of a Tibetan Goddess: Narrating the Tragic and Non-traditional Life Story of the Lay Mother Reincarnate Kelzang Drölma
  • Cody Jones: The Hegemony of Hyperstition: Notes on Creation and Horror
  • Maureen Kelly: Confessions, Confessions: Reading Augustine and Rousseau after Foucault
  • Daniel Kim: Modern Medicine and the Hermeneutical Self: Meaning, Ethics, and Identity
  • Sojung Kim: A Spirituality of Becoming: Exploring Christian Vernacular Mysticism Via Feminist Theological Anthropology and Everyday Language Use
  • Andrew Kunze: Transnational Svāminārāyaṇ Hinduism: Mass Mediation and the Rise of BAPS
  • Mark Lambert: The Sacramental Sickness: The Symptomatic Correlation Between Leprosy and the Eucharist in Historical Theology
  • Dov Lerner: Dark Matter: Malbim’s Exegetical Pedagogy
  • Nabanjan Maitra: The Rebirth of Homo Vedicus: Monastic Governmentality in Medieval India
  • Yiftach Ofek: The New Jew of Zionist Historiography: The Social Vision and Historical Imagination of Yitzhak Baer, Gershom Scholem, and Yehezkel Kauffman
  • Andrew Packman: Theology and the Atmospherics of Race: Schleiermacher, Affectivity, and the Tenacity of Racism
  • Elizabeth Sartell: Mystical Philosophy: Ibn al-ʿArabī’s Lettrist Cosmogony
  • Yonatan Shemesh: Averroes as Intertext: Moses Narboni's Commentary on Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed
  • Christine Trotter: Hellenistic Jews and Consolatory Rhetoric: Four Case Studies from 2 Maccabees to the Letter to the Hebrews
  • Hector Varela Rios: To “Take Care” and  “Venerate”: Morenita, Excessive Personhood, and Devotedness in a Puerto Rican Family
  • Ori Werdiger: A Radical Epistemology of Judaism: Knowledge and History in the Postwar Thought of Jacob Gordin (1896-1947) and Léon Askenazi (1922-1996)

2020

  • Bevin Blaber: Under the Influence of Writing: Maurice Blanchot's Interwar Journalism
  • Gregory Chatterley: Salt and Light: Free Churches, Suburban Evangelicals and the Transformation of White Supremacy in the United States
  • Francesca Chubb-Confer: Islamic Modernity, Lyric Ambiguity: Muhammad Iqbal and the Ghazal
  • Marshall Cunningham: (Re)-Constructing Judeaness: Homeland, Diaspora, and the Construction of Judean Identity in the 6th and 5th Centuries BCE
  • Thomas Scott Ferguson: The Needs of Reason: Kant, Metaphysics and the Proofs for the Existence of God
  • Michele Ferris: The Religious Bildungsurgertum in the Queen City: Race and Cultural Politics in Cincinnati's Denomnational Newspapers, 1830-1862
  • Kelli Gardner: The Figure and Figuration of Woman in the Hebrew Bible
  • Robert Greenlee III: World's Collide: The Competing Legal Cosmologies of Tokugawa Japan
  • David Gregg: Artificial Gods: Whiteheadian Aesthetics and the Art of Theater
  • Eun Young Hwang: Therapeutic Vision, Discipline and Religious Virtue in Ordinary Life: A Comparative Ethical Analysis of Augustine and Zhiyi
  • David Latimore: Liberating the Neoliberal Black Church: A Theological Response to the Ideological Influence of Neoliberalism on the Black Church
  • Elena Lloyd-Sidle: Theologies of Connectivity: Exploring the Nexus of Spirit and Context
  • Joyce Shin: Faith in an Age of Cultural Pluralism: An Aesthetic Approach to Transformation
  • Matthew Vanderpoel: Contingency, Theology, and Poetry at the Collège de Navarre in the Age of Gerson
  • Alexander Wolfson: Force and Stabilization: Transness in 20th Century Critical Thought
  • Daniel Wyche: The Politics of Self-Overcoming: Spiritual Exercises and Political Liberation from Michael Foucault to Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Richard Zaleski: Between the Literal and the Allegorical: Biblical Paraphrase and Mediation of Scripture in Philo of Alexandria's and Gregory of Nyssa's Lives of Moses

2019

  • David Barr: Christian Realist Environmental Ethics
  • Ezra Blaustein: “Cataloging Revelation: Echoes of Islamic Legal Theory in Maimonides’ Sefer ha-Mitsvot” 
  • John Whitney Buchman: The Price of Solidarity: Adam Smith, Thomas Aquinas, and the Ethics of Exchange  
  • James Robert Covington: The Poetics of Translation in Greek Genesis and the Virtuous Plot 
  • Darryl Scott Dale-Ferguson: Capable Agents and Just Institutions: A Reconstruction of Paul Ricoeur's "Ethical Aim" Using Anthony Giddens' Theory of Structuration
  • Jessie DeGrado: Authoring Empire: Intellectual Engagement with the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the Bible
  • Cameron Ferguson: The Binding of Past to Present: A New Perspective on the Use of Paul in the Gospel of Mark 
  • William Ezekiel Goggin: Hegel's Sacrificial Imagination
  • Timothy Gutmann: Conscripting Traditions: Islam, Confucianism, Modernity 
  • Michelle Harrington: Laying Down One’s Life: Autonomy in the Time of Medicalized Death 
  • Lisa Landoe Hedrick: Theology after the Problem of Intentionality: A Whiteheadian Corrective for Analytic Philosophy of Language 
  • Aaron Thomas Hollander: The Multimediation of Holiness: Hagiography as Resistance in Greek Orthodox Theological Culture 
  • Alexander Ong Hsu: Practices of Scriptural Economy: Compiling and Copying a Seventh-Century Chinese Buddhist Anthology 
  • Russell Paul Johnson: Communication Ethics in Social Conflict: Nonviolent and Christian Perspectives
  • Michael Thomas Le Chevallier: The Stain of Association and the Burden of Membership: Institutional Ethics in Paul Ricoeur and Catholic Social Thought
  • Robert John Porwoll: Parisian Pedagogies: The Educational Debate between Peter Abelard, Hugh of Saint-Victor, Peter Lombard, and John of Salisbury 
  • Hannah Amaris Roh: Specters of Western Metaphysics: Christianity and Colonial Modernity in Early Modern Korea, 1876-1945 
  • Susan Christopher Shields: Beyond Words: Reading the Bible in Antebellum Contexts 
  • Sam Berrin Shonkoff: Sacramental Existence: Embodiment in Martin Buber’s Philosophical and Hasidic Writings 
  • David Kerman Tomlinson: Buddahood and Philosophy of Mind: Rat na karashanti, Gyana shri mitra, and the Debate over Mental Content (Akara)

Past Dissertations

  • Shatha Almutawa: Imaginative cultures and historic transformations: Narrative in “Rasā'il Ikhwān Al-Safā'”  (2013)
  • Elizabeth Ann Hayes Alvarez: The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary as Imagined by American Catholics and Protestants, 1854–1904 (2011)
  • Jessica Hope Andruss: Exegesis, homily, and historical reflection in the Arabic commentary on lamentations by Salmon ben Yerūhīm, tenth-century Karaite of Jerusalem (2015)
  • Anthony Banout: The Traditionalist Evasion of Religious Freedom: Islamic Modernist Responses to Failures in Anglo-American Ethical Theory (2012)
  • Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed: “Knowledge and Felicity of the Soul in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī” (2018)
  • Joseph Daniels Blosser: Ethics before God and markets: A theory of moral action in conversation with Adam Smith and Ernst Troeltsch (2011) 
  • Samuel Brody:“This Pathless Hour: Messianism, Anarchism, Zionism, and Martin Buber’s Political Theology Reconsidered” (2013)
  • Halim Calis: “Akbari Hermeneutics: Shams al-Din al-Fanari and His Qur’an Commentary” (2018)
  • Maura Campanelli: Pastor, preacher, judge: The papacy under debate in three sixteenth-century writings (2010)
  • Lucas Carmichael: The "Daode Jing" as American Scripture: Text, Tradition, and Translation 
  • Jason Grant Cather: The Ontological Argument, its Criticisms and Consequences (2017)
  • Paul H. B. Chang: "The Spiritual Human is Discerned by No One": An Intellectual Biography of Watchman Nee (2017)
  • Darnell Maurice Charles: Heresy, treason, and royal prerogative: Henry VIII and the plenitude of power (2013) 
  • Rana Choi: Erich Auerbach and his interlocutors: A comparison of literary critical methodologies (2013) 
  • Brian Hagen Collins: Headless mothers, magic cows, and lakes of blood: The Paraśhurāma cycle in the “Mahābhārata” and beyond (2010) 
  • Joshua Andrew Connor: Recollecting the Soul: Studies of the Psyche and the I-Thou Relation (2017)
  • Manuel A. Cruz: The Ethical Passing of God: Kant and Levinas (2011) 
  • Joshua Leonard Daniel: Transforming faith: H. Richard Niebuhr and Paulo Freire on moral education (2013)
  • Raphael Alexande Dascalu: Philology, philosophy, and Sufism: Towards an understanding of Tanhum Ha-Yerushalmi's exegesis and thought, with a focus on his commentaries on Jonah, the Song of Songs, and Qohelet (2016)
  • Andrew DeCort: Bonhoeffer's beginning: Universal entry, the problem of morality, and the ethics of new beginning (2015)
  • Carrie Beth Dohe: The wandering archetype: C. G. Jung's “Wotan” and Germanic-Aryan myth and ideology (2012)
  • Erik Dreff: The Intellectual Love of God in Spinoza (2017)
  • Matthijs den Dulk: Defining difference: Justin Martyr and the invention of heresy among Jews and Christians (2015)
  • Patricia Ann Duncan: Novel hermeneutics: Gospel exegesis in the Pseudo-Clementine "Homilies" 
  • Andrew Francis Durdin: Redescribing "Magic": Discourse, Alterity, and Religion in the Roman World (2017)
  • Tarick Elgendy: Power, complicity, and resistance: Rereading "the powers" with Karl Barth and Michel Foucault (2014) 
  • Debra Joy Erickson: A world for people and people for the world: Using casuistry in environmental decision-making (2010) 
  • Vincent Matthew Evener: "Enemies of the cross": Suffering, salvation, and truth in sixteenth-century religious controversy (2014) 
  • Stephanie Anne Frank: Secularity in Durkheim's and Mauss' imagings of sociality and sociology (2015) 
  • Eszter Katalin Fuzessy: “Dialogues between sages and outsiders to the tradition”: Creation of difference as a literary method of religious polemics in rabbinic literature (2011)  
  • David N. Gottlieb: Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac, Interpretations of Sacrifice, and the Formation of Jewish Memory. (2018)
  • Adrian Nicolae Guiu: Reading scripture, unifying creation: Becoming the officina omnium in John Scottus Eriugena's Periphyseon (2014) 
  • Sean Michael Hannan: Belatedness: Augustine on transformation in time and history (2016)
  • Mathew Cooper Harriss: Race and the religious unconscious: Ralph Ellison's invisible theology
  • Pierre-Julien Harter: Buddhas in the making: Path, perfectibility, and gnosis in the Abhisamayālamkāra literature (2015) 
  • Justin Wesley Henry: Distant Shores of Dharma: Historical Imagination in Sri Lanka From the Late Medieval Period
  • Timothy M. Hiller: Justification and moral value: Martin Luther on good, evil, and the moral self 
  • Richard J. Hoskins: Reinhold Niebuhr and international society: The concord of Christian Realism and the English School of International Relations theory
  • John William Cheairs Howell: Civil War literature and the prospect of America (2013) 
  • Amanda Jean Huffer: Darshan in a hotel ballroom: Amritanandamayi Ma's (Amma's) communities of devotees in the United States (2010) ​
  • Sarah Imhoff: Making Jewish gender: Religion, race, sexuality, and American Jews, 1910–1924 (2010) 
  • Jeffrey Israel: Jewish humor and the political ethics of de-stigmatization (2011) 
  • Norman Scott Johnson: Franciscan passions: Missions to the Muslims, desire for martyrdom and institutional identity in the later Middle Ages (2010) 
  • Rory Mosi Johnson: Precious memories: The acculturation of memory in African American religion (2010)
  • Ruchama Jerusha Johnston-Bloom: Oriental studies and Jewish questions: German-Jewish encounters with Muhammad, the Qur'an, and Islamic modernities (2014)  
  • Pamela James Jones: Submission, suffering, and God: Enslaved Christian women's identity in the American antebellum period, 1830–1865 (2010) 
  • Seon Yong Kim: The Pauline gospel protected with a curse: An investigation of the curse motifs in Galatians (2016)
  • Evan Francis Kuehn: Troeltsch's eschatological absolute (2016)
  • Marc Edward Livecche: With malice toward none: The moral ground for killing in war (2015)
  • David Patrick Lyons: Philosophy, Politeness, and Party: David Hume and the Constitution of a Modern Social Order (2017) 
  • Katharine Mershon, “Canine Redemption Narratives in the American Imaginary, 1981-2001” (2018)
  • Anne Taylor Mocko: Demoting Vishnu: Ritual, politics, and the unmaking of Nepal's monarchy (2012) 
  • David Gregory Monaco: “The Sentences of the Syriac Menander”: Introduction, text and translation, and commentary (2011) 
  • Jeremy G. Morse:Devotion According to the Rules: Guru-Bhakti in the Texts and Practices of the Datta Sampradāya (2017)
  • Chaim Meir Neria:"It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir" (Job 28:16): Rabbi Joseph B. Shem-Tob's commentary on Aristotle's  Nicomachean Ethics sources and analysis (2015)
  • Lauren Evans Osborne: From Text to Sound to Perception: Modes and Relationships of Meaning in the Recited Qur’an
  • Elizabeth Ann Perez: Narrative, seasoning, song: Praxis, subjectivity, and transformation in an African-American Lucumí community (2010)
  • Seth Perry: The endless making of many books: Bibles and religious authority in America, 1780–1850 (2013)
  • Matthew R. Petrusek:Catholic social ethics and the (in)vulnerability of human dignity (2013)
  • Ayse Polat: Subject to approval: Sanction and censure in Ottoman Istanbul (1889-1923) (2015) 
  • Charles Scott Preston: Writing a more "Samskrta" India: Religion, culture, and politics in V. Raghavan's twentieth-century Sanskrit literature (2016)
  • Kyle Rader: Learning to love: A constructive theology of ascetic reading from I John to Ernst Troeltsch (2016) 
  • Andrew Reinsch: Recogimiento and the memory of God (2017) 
  • Bruce Pantaleo Rittenhouse: Shopping for meaningful lives: A Christian existential reinterpretation of the moral motivation of consumerism through the theology of Paul Tillich (2010) 
  • Gabriel A. Robinson: Bullfighting and bull taming: Formations of religion and masculinity (2012)
  • Heather Miller Rubens, “Also Other: Utilizing Different Minority Narratives in the Making of Anglo-Jewish Identity” (2011)
  • Noah Salomon: In the Shadow of Salvation: Sufis, Salafis, and the Project of Late Islamism in Contemporary Sudan (2010)
  • Daniel J. Schultz: On the Use and Abuse of Religion: Reading Foucault on History, Truth, and Subjectivity
  • Mun’im Sirry: Reformist Muslim Approaches to the Polemics of the Qur’an against Other Religions (2012)
  • Joseph Edward Steineger IV:The naturally implanted knowledge of God's existence: Two 13th- century scholastic interpretations of John of Damascus and Anselm of Bec (2014)
  • Daniel DeForrest Strand: The gods of the nations: St. Augustine's apocalyptic political theology (2015)
  • Myung Sahm Suh: Generational Dynamics and the Consolidation of the Christian Right in Contemporary South Korea (2017) 
  • Sandra Jeanne Sullivan-Dunbar :“I was hungry and you gave me food”: Agape, justice and special relations seen through the lens of dependent care (2010)
  • Alan Thomas Terlep: Inventing the Rapture: The formation of American dispensationalism, 1850–1875 (2010)
  • Alexs Thompson: Re-reading al-Tabarī: Towards a narratological interpretation of the “History” (2014)
  • Erika Joy Johnson Tritle: To the Jew first and to the Greek: Alonso de Cartagena's "Defensorium Unitatis Christianae" and the problem of Jewish flesh in fifteenth-century Spain (2015) 
  • Michael Richard Turner: Does the laborer deserve to be paid?: The place of desert in a Christian conception of distributive justice
  • Dov Weiss: Confrontations with God in late rabbinic literature (2011) 
  • Robyn Jane Whitaker: Seeing god: Ekphrasis, vision, and persuasion in the Book of Revelation (2014) 
  • Rebecca Wollenberg, “The People of the Book without the Book: Jewish Ambivalence towards the Biblical Text after the Rise of Christianity” (2015)
  • Sarah Shaw Yardney: Interpretation in the Septuagint of Samuel (2018)
  • Daniel Yingst: Towers in the Mud: Honorius Augustodunensis Through the Lens of Pedagogy (2017)
  • Alexandra Kathryn Zirkle: Modeling the temple: The politics of German Jewish biblical hermeneutics (2016)