John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics Awards Four Postdoctoral Fellowships for 2022-2023

The John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis is pleased to announce it has awarded four postdoctoral fellowships to exceptional early career scholars. The fellowships will begin with the 2022-2023 academic year and are renewable for the following year.

Susanna De Stradis is currently a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Notre Dame. After earning a B.A., an M.A., and a Licenza from the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa, Italy, she moved to the U.S. to further specialize in twentieth-century American Catholicism and its cultural and institutional relationship with Rome. Her dissertation, “Making Religion Safe for Democracy: The Catholic Argument for the ‘Nation Under God’ (1939-1965),” investigates the U.S. Catholic reflection on religious freedom and church-state relations in a period characterized by constitutional change and lively debate on the place of religion and religious actors in democratic regimes on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2020-2021, Susanna was a Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellow with the Social Science Research Council. 

Cody Musselman is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at Yale University. She is an ethnographer of contemporary American religion, focusing on the intersections of religion, capitalism, materiality, the body, and health. Her dissertation, “Spiritual Exercises: Fitness and Religion in Modern America” observes how the structuring logics of American Christianity operate in the consumerist landscape of health, wellness, and fitness to understand how religion is enlisted in the politicized work of reforming the body. In 2019-2020, she was a visiting graduate research fellow with the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. Cody earned master’s degrees at Yale University, an M.T.S. in Religions of the Americas from Harvard Divinity School, and her B.A. from Kalamazoo College.

Aram Sarkisian is a historian of religion, immigration, and labor in the twentieth-century United States. He is currently a History Department Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Northwestern University, where he earned his Ph.D. in history. His current book project, “A Helper and Protector: Russian Orthodox Christians in the United States, 1893-1924,” explores how the Russian Orthodox Church built a wide-reaching, transnational network of spiritual and material aid for working-class immigrant believers at the turn of the twentieth century, only for those efforts to be challenged both by the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the United States’ first Red Scare. Aram earned a master’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a B.A. from the University of Michigan.

Esra Tunc is a Ph.D. Candidate in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research, which uses historical and ethnographic methodologies, aims to contribute to the study of religion and capital in light of feminist, critical race, and environmental studies. Her dissertation, titled “Islam, Justice, and Innovating Capital in the United States,” examines how new forms of capitalism, such as impact investment and social entrepreneurship, bring together investment and giving with questions of justice and ethics in American Muslim contexts. Esra earned a master’s degree in Religious Studies from New York University and her B.A. from Erciyes University in Turkey.

These awards are one expression of the Center’s mission to support scholars early in their careers. Fellows will work to complete their first book projects during their term at the Center and will participate in the intellectual life of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, and Washington University in St. Louis, through teaching courses and joining the Center’s biweekly interdisciplinary seminar.

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/.