John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics Awards Three Postdoctoral Fellowships for 2025-2026

The faculty of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis is pleased to announce its new cohort of postdoctoral fellows. The fellowships will begin with the 2024-2025 academic year and are renewable for the following year.

Chanhee Heo is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies (with a minor in History) at Stanford University this summer. Her research examines race and religion in a global context, also expanding to consider popular culture and secular/ism studies. Her dissertation is titled “Thy Kin-dom Come: Constructing Race, Religion, and Nation in the Pacific World,” and tells the story of Korean migrants who traversed the Pacific from Korea to Hawai‘i and the American mainland in the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

Laura Simpson is a Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. Her research focuses on the American prison museum as a site of religious and political formation, with a particular interest in how practices of carceral storytelling can both reinscribe and subvert linear understandings of time. Her dissertation “Doing Time: Temporality and Representation in a Carceral Context,” engages the narrative work of the Sing Sing Prison Museum in Ossining, New York.

Zara Surratt is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her dissertation is titled “‘Those Who Wear Black Dresses:’ Immigration and Assimilation at St. Francis Mission School” and examines Catholic participation in Federal Indian Policy during the late 19th and early 20th century and the concurrent experiences of Native American youth.

The three awardees bring to 35 the number of fellows supported by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics since the inauguration of the program in 2012.

The fellowships are one expression of the Center’s mission to support scholars early in their careers. Fellows work to complete their first book or subsequent projects during their term at the Center, and they actively participate in the intellectual life of the Center and the University through teaching undergraduate students, joining the Center’s biweekly interdisciplinary seminar, and engaging our public programming.

The John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics was established in 2010 and is located on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The Center serves as an open venue for fostering rigorous scholarship and informing broad academic and public communities about the intersections of religion and U.S. politics.

For more information about the Center’s fellowship programs, please see http://rap.wustl.edu/fellowships/.