Working in the Field

I am a Ph.D Candidate specializing in Buddhist tantra, specifically Dzogchen, though I wear many other hats. My dissertation explores the relationship between Buddhist literature and time, specifically, how form and content may interplay to cultivate more expansive and compassionate temporal relationalities that disrupt monolithic narratives of time, and thus create liberative possibilities. In both my pedagogy and my work, I seek to actively dissolve disciplinary boundaries. I approach my scholarship the same way I would any other kind of creative collaboration: in reciprocal relationality with community—whether textual communities, scholarly ones, activist ones, or otherwise. I am animated by a diverse range of inspirations, spanning from Buddhist stories, to queer theory, to literature of all genres, film, and of course, my many different conversation partners/friends. This year I’m proud to be teaching a course called “Queering Buddhism: Gender, Sexuality, Liberatory Praxis,” which is a culmination of a personal project of mine to investigate the possibilities and constraints to queering or transforming any institution, and how the field of queer studies and feminist studies might constructively, and ethically be in conversation with Buddhist theories of liberation.

Apart from my designated role as a PhD student, I previously served as the co-president of the Buddhist Community at Stanford (BCAS) for three years, where I initiated a shift towards framing Buddhism as compassionate intersectionality rather than purely Buddhist identity, and helped to host a range of speakers, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, who are committed to an ethics of nonviolence, anti-racism, and moving beyond restrictive binaries. Through BCAS and other communities on campus, I am also actively engaged in screenwriting, playwriting, filmmaking, and other forms of creative work like this two-part podcast called “Queer Joy and Community Resilience: Voices from Stanford.” My most recent short film 新年快樂 Happy New Year focuses on the intersection of religion and nonviolence; it is about a Taiwanese-American Buddhist who resolves to say goodbye to 2021 by committing to five acts of random kindness, but her resolve is shaken when she becomes a target of anti-Asian violence. This film was made in response to the rise in anti-Asian violence around the Stanford and greater Bay area during the pandemic and in hopes that it could foster more nuanced and complex conversations on how to continually commit to compassion in a world that is endlessly violent.

I am a scholar of religion and race in American history. My first two monographs look at Christian ideas of hell and at the category of the “heathen” to investigate the relationship between religious othering and race-making in the US. I am also a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History. In my research and my teaching, I seek to complicate the discipline of “history” in relation to “religion” and “race,” and to trace broad changes and continuities over time while remaining attentive to a diversity of lived experiences. 

In my classes and engagement with students, I also try to show how I do this work, from thinking about paragraph structure to sharing templates for research and reading notes. I believe that talking about and practicing practical skills is an essential way to build equitable and inclusive community and to foster collaboration. I didn’t come into grad school knowing how to write an article or a book, and I try to create spaces where students and faculty can be vulnerable together as we learn from each other and read each other’s work.

Anuj M. Amin, Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Religious Studies, specializes in traditions of late antiquity. From his perspective, historical reconstructions of the late ancient world are fundamentally dependent on understanding the diversity of communities, identities, and cultures of the period:

“Working across languages like Middle Persian, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, I am constantly amazed by the societal complexity of this era. My research, which considers demonic possessions, exorcisms, and magic, is an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor. I look at literature, art, and ritual from Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian sources to understand how these traditions may have had shared conceptions of the infernal. My research emphasizes the importance of considering identity, and through my research, I ultimately strive to create a more complete reconstruction of lived religion in the late ancient world.

Naomi Mendez is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Stanford University, specializing in medieval Jewish and Christian mysticism. She received her BA in Religious Studies from San Diego State University, which included a focus on Cultural Anthropology and French. She received her MTS From Harvard Divinity School in Jewish Studies. 

Naomi's dissertation charts a new way of thinking about the varying gender presentations in a collection of texts that have been referred to as the 'crowning jewel of Jewish mysticism', namely, the Sefer ha-Zohar. Naomi's project is inherently interdisciplinary, as it seriously considers the varying literary, cultural, linguistic and religious traditions that contributed to the thirteenth-century cosmopolitan empire of the Iberian King, Alfonso X. She seeks to fill a lacuna in the field which has yet to acknowledge that the Iberian kabbalist(s) who produced the Zohar and its gender ideology were molded by the lives, poetic trends and literary projects of this time and place. She ultimately hopes that her work will be conducive of new perspectives in the field.

Naomi is currently working on numerous translation projects featuring medieval Jewish and Christian texts. She is aware that there are few Spanish-speaking scholars in the fields of Jewish Studies and Jewish mysticism, and even fewer Spanish-speaking female scholars. Working with languages like Aramaic, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Galician-Portuguese and Castilian, she is passionate about making key medieval texts and reliable scholarship accessible to Spanish-speakers all around the world.

As a historian of African Atlantic religion, my research and teaching examine the conflicts and exchanges that have occasioned the appearance of religion as an academic category and race as a global system of human organization. I am particularly interested in the ways that enslaved and colonized peoples challenge, nuance, and expand concepts of religion, while theorizing and practicing visions of themselves and their communities apart from the category’s colonial impositions. My first book explores how enslaved African-descended women responded to the material conditions of enslavement through varied social, sexual, and parental strategies. Like the rest of my work, the book interrogates the broad themes of race, religion, and gender through recourses to the mundane—recognizing that social, academic, and legal constructs operate and find meaning in everyday interactions and intimate spaces. For me, theorizing the experiences and epistemologies of the people who constitute everyday spaces and using them as a source of knowledge about race, religion, gender, and other categories we consider in religious studies is essential to creating truly inclusive spaces and equity in the field.

jem studies historic inter-religious communities in California’s Central Valley. Her dissertation draws on four case studies that show the ways immigrant and Indigenous laborers navigated laws and policies that upheld (and uphold) white supremacy by forming coalitions and communities across religious, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and gender differences. Her work brings in methods from religious studies, sociology, history, labor studies, and earth science.

jem hopes her work will urge scholars of religion in America and scholars of the American West to see the importance of "encounter" in the history of the American West. Further, she focuses on the Central Valley because the region is essential to the formation of California and big agriculture, yet is often overlooked in studies of the American West. jem enjoys teaching and consulting with the Center for Teaching and Learning on Campus, being a member of the American Religions in Global Context Seminar, and serving as a research assistant for the Shared Sacred Spaces Project.

Sunil D. Persad is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies and specializes in Late Antique Christianity. His academic and professional experiences, together with his mixed Caribbean roots, have made him aware of the ramifications resulting from a lack of diversity and the significance of making every voice heard. As he describes, this has become one of the guiding principles of his studies:

“My interests center on challenging some of the dominant reconstructions of early Christian communities. These narratives are often evaluated through certain categories like orthodoxy and orthopraxis, which not only determine which stories are told, but also which are forgotten. A contributing factor to this problem is that the body of scholars in this field also suffers from a lack of unique voices that would otherwise contribute to a more integrated discussion. My research intersects at these obstacles and is essential, both in and out of the classroom, in embracing a more complete account of Christian history.”

Ralph H. Craig III is a Ph.D. Candidate in Religious Studies at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, where his studies included comparative theology and Yoga Studies. He is currently writing a religious biography of Tina Turner (under contract). His dissertation is a study of medieval representations of Buddhist preachers across South Asian Buddhist literature. Other interests include metaphysical religion, African American religious history, and religion and popular culture.

My early encounters with religion were in New Orleans, Louisiana, my hometown. There, I encountered Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostal, Voodoo, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist communities. These communities are heterogenous. Consequently, my interest in Religious Studies lay primarily in the exploration of such heterogenous religious communities.

I am painfully aware that there are few Black scholars working in my areas of specialization and I am determined to ensure that this situation does not continue.

I believe that research in the humanities, and religious studies in particular, is crucial for the global preservation of democratic civil values in the twenty-first century. In this spirit, my research reflects an ethical imperative to contribute to our understanding of how religion interfaces with systems of power and public discourse, past and present. My first book, Hindu Pluralism: Religion in the Public Sphere in Early Modern South India, examines the distinctive place of religion in public space and public discourse in South Asian early modernity. In particular, I argue that Hindu sectarian communities facilitated the emergence of parallel, overlapping public domains, creating an unfamiliar but effective approach for managing conflict and religious coexistence. Likewise, my forthcoming book, The Meeting of Rivers: Translating Religion in Early Modern India, illustrates how notions of caste and community belonging in premodern Śaiva traditions provides resources for the present for rethinking democratic engagement across the spectrum of society. My work in progress builds directly on these themes: I am working on a comparative theoretical project aimed at examining how religious experience interfaces with various modes of political engagement in the twenty-first century world.

Esiteli Hafoka is a PhD candidate in the Religious Studies Department at Stanford University. She received her MA from Stanford and her BA in Religious Studies and Ancient History from UC Riverside. Esiteli’s dissertation surveys Tongan historical narratives, ethnographies, social media, and personal interviews to argue that religion is essential to understanding Tongan collective identity in America. Her dissertation identifies religious threads connecting 19th c. Methodist Christianity, Mormonism, national Tongan democracy, and Tongan Crip Gang members in Utah. Esiteli’s research reveals the ways Tongans navigate their racial identity in America through a religious epistemology, and how, for Tongan Americans, religion and race are co-constitutional.

Out of about 60,000 Tongans in the U.S., Esiteli is currently the only Tongan PhD student at Stanford—it would not be a stretch to claim that she is the first Tongan PhD student at Stanford.  As of 2017, there are six known Tongan women who hold PhDs in the U.S., and Esiteli is among a few in the pipeline. Doctoral students often address the loneliness of PhD study but her own experiences with loneliness are compounded by the pressures of representing an entire ethnic demographic. The added weight of becoming a parent in graduate school protracted Esiteli's time to degree, but she was fortunate to receive the DARE fellowship through the VPGE at Stanford to complete researching and writing her dissertation while still providing for her family.