2015–16 Fellows

MID-CAREER FELLOWS
Bernadette McCauley (Associate Professor of History, Hunter College) is the author of Who Shall Take Care of Our Sick: Roman Catholic Sisterhoods and Their Hospitals in New York City (JHU Press, 2005.) Her research examines the social aspects of medicine and, specifically, the involvement of women religious in education, healthcare and social welfare in the United States, and her work has been published in both medical and religious historical publications. Her current work is a study of the origins and articulation of vocation among American women religious; for this seminar, her project examines American women who choose the religious life in the early twentieth century.

Shehzad Nadeem is a sociologist and author of Dead Ringers: How Outsourcing is Changing the Way Indians Understand Themselves (Princeton UP, 2011). He is currently working on a book project about yoga provisionally titled, Bourgeois Bodies: How Yoga was Made Modern and Middle Class. Prof. Nadeem teaches classes on urban and global sociology at Lehman College, CUNY.

DISSERTATION FELLOWS
Jeff Diamant is a doctoral student in History who is interested in globalization, transnationalism, and questions of religious authority as they relate to post-1945 American religious history. He focuses especially on African-American Muslim history. Before entering graduate school he was an award-winning journalist who worked for the Newark Star-Ledger and Charlotte Observer. A graduate of Yale College, he has taught American History at Lehman College and journalism classes at Rutgers University-Newark.

Jamie Lindsay is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation considers several substantive challenges to the consensus-oriented model of communicative ethics and the discourse theory of law and democracy, as developed by Jürgen Habermas, considered in cross-cultural and postcolonial contexts, including challenges posed by Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation and Jacques Rancière’s model of politics as dissensus. Jamie is particularly interested Habermas’ differentiation of moral, ethical, legal, and religious discourses, and in the variance in justifiability of claims in each discursive context.

Stephanie Grace Petinos is a Ph.D. candidate in French at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, “Holiness: The Contribution of Eleven Vernacular Narrative Texts from the 12th to the 14th Centuries,” investigates intersections of the sacred and the secular in selected medieval texts. Her interdisciplinary research combines Medieval literature (Old French and Middle English), Medieval history, Medieval spirituality, Ecocritical theory and hagiography. She has a forthcoming article, “The Ecology of Relics in Philippe de Remi’s Le Roman de la Manekine,” that will appear in an edited collection of works entitled “Medieval Ecocriticisms” (Amsterdam University Press 2017). Her research has been supported by the CUNY Graduate Center as a a Dissertation Fellow (2014-2015) and currently as a Fellow in the Mellon Committee for the Study of Religion. She also teaches courses on language, civilization and culture at Hunter College.

Lisa Tagliaferri is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature and Renaissance Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation focuses on Catherine of Siena’s mystical writing and its reception in both England and Italy through to the 16th century. This comparative research is utilizing a digital humanities approach in order to map networks of readers and analyze text and translation. She holds an MSc from the University of London (Queen Mary), an MA from Binghamton University, and a BA from the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College. She is a Futures Initiative Fellow, the recipient of a Doctoral Student Research Grant for archival research in Italy, and currently participating in a seminar at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

RELIGION COMMITTEE GRADUATE FELLOW
Joanna Tice works at the intersection of political theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. Her dissertation project describes the political thought of contemporary evangelicalism as it pivots away from the Christian right. Previous projects include the study of “fundamentalist feminisms,” and analysis of the U.S. discourse around undocumented immigration. Joanna is currently an American Studies dissertation fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center where her research has been supported by the Advanced Research Collaborative and the Committee for the Study of Religion. She has taught courses in political theory, American politics, American political thought, and politics and religion at Brooklyn College, and has worked as a Writing Across the Curriculum fellow at Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she trained faculty in writing pedagogies. Joanna holds a B.A. in Government and Philosophy from Wesleyan University and is currently a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center.