PEOPLE

Education: B.A. Drew University, M.Div. Princeton, Ph.D. Duke University

Esther Chung-Kim is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. She has been teaching in Claremont since 2007 and regularly offers courses on 1) History of World Christianity, 2) Poverty, Wealth, and Social Change; 3) European Reformation, and 4) Religion and Politics in East Asia. She is currently serving as Associate Director of The Gould Center for Humanistic Studies. Her research focuses on the history of biblical interpretation, the problem of contested authority, poor relief, and social welfare reform. She has published Inventing Authority: Use of the Church Fathers in Reformation Debates over the Eucharist (2011), Reformation Commentary on Scripture: Acts (2014), “Advocating for Poor Relief in Zurich: Heinrich Bullinger’s Contributions to Religious Ideals and Swiss Policy Reforms,” (2017) and “Aid for Refugees: Religion, Migration and Poor Relief in Sixteenth-Century Geneva,” (2018). She is a 2018-2019 recipient of the Sabbatical Grant for Researchers from The Louisville Institute and currently is the chair of the Roland Bainton Reference Book Prize Committee. Her forthcoming book, Economics of Faith examines the role of religious leaders in the development of early modern social reform in the care of the poor. Outside of CMC, she serves on two advisory boards for non-profit organizations.

Education: B.A., Whitworth University; M.Div., Princeton Theological Seminary; Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University

Teaching: Philosophy of religion

Research: History of philosophy (ancient), Christian Thought

Education: U.C. Santa Barbara (Ph.D), Dartmouth College (Fellow), Harvard University (Master’s), Princeton Seminary (Master’s)

Gastón Espinosa is the Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College. He has given 200 lectures on religion, race, politics, and social change in the U.S. and Europe. Espinosa was named a César Chávez Fellow at Dartmouth College, an Andrew Mellon Fellow at Northwestern University, a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Excellence at Münster University (Germany), and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He teaches courses on Religion, Race, & Civil Rights Movement, Religion & Film, Mystics, Prophets and Social Change, U.S. Latino Religions, and Religion, Politics & Global Violence. Espinosa is the author or edited of nine books, including Latino Religions and Civic Activism (Oxford 2005), Mexican American Religions (Duke 2007), Religion, Race & American Presidency (2008, 2011), Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith & Politics in Action (Harvard 2014), and Protestants on Screen: Religion, Politics and Aesthetics in European and American Film (Oxford forthcoming). He is the past President of La Comunidad of Religions at the American Academy of Religion, Co-Editor of the Columbia University Series in Religion & Politics, and past Chair of the Religious Studies Department at CMC.

Education: B.A., Haverford College; M.A., Ph.D., Columbia University

Gary Gilbert is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College, with a focus on Jewish Studies, particularly Jewish communities in the Greek and Roman periods. His research focuses in two areas, and Jewish communities in the Greek and Roman periods. He is author of the commentary on Acts of the Apostles in the Jewish Annotated New Testament and of several articles on the Jewish community of late antique Aphrodisias. Claremont McKenna College is a small, liberal arts college located 35 miles east of Los Angeles, California. There Professor Gilbert teaches a wide array of courses in Jewish Studies, including courses on the ancient Jewish experience, Jewish art and identity, women and gender in Jewish tradition, a history of Jerusalem, and Zionism and Israel. Professor Gilbert received his bachelors in Classics from Haverford College (Pennsylvania) and his doctorate in biblical studies from Columbia University (New York), with additional studies in Jewish history at The Jewish Theological Seminary and early Christianity at Union Theological Seminary. Professor Gilbert also serves on the staff of the Tel Akko archaeological excavations in Israel, and has published on the Jewish community of Akko. In addition to his time at CMC, Professor Gilbert has been Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and at the Institute for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, and has served President of the Pacific Region of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Education: A.B., Grinnell College; M.A., Ph.D., University of Iowa

Teaching: Method and Theory in Religious Studies,South Asian Religions,Goddess Traditions,Models of Hindu Leadership

Research: Gender and Religion, Modern Hindu Goddess Worship, History of Hinduism in America

Education: B.A. Barnard College; M.A. and Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara; M.A. Boston University; M.F.A. Warren Wilson College

Chloe Martinez is a scholar of South Asian religions and a poet. She is Program Coordinator for the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at Claremont McKenna College, and Lecturer and Fellow in Sikh Studies in CMC’s Department of Religious Studies. A graduate of Barnard College, where she was a Mellon Mays Fellow, she received her MA and PhD in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara. Research and teaching interests include Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist traditions of South Asia; medieval North India; poetry and autobiography in South Asia; and Asian American Studies. Her research appears in The Medieval History Journal and South Asia, and has been funded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and SSRC-Mellon Mays. Her forthcoming monograph explores religion and autobiography in pre-modern and modern South Asia.

Education: Bowdoin College, BA John Carroll University, MEd University of California, Santa Barbara, MA and PhD

Teaching: South Asian Culture and Religion, Religion and Modernity, Digital Humanities

Research: Religion and Material Culture India Digital Humanities, Archaeology, and the Production and Representation of Virtual Places Indo-Portuguese Contact

Jamel Velji is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College. His work lies at the intersection between Islamic Studies and Religious Studies and is particularly concerned with the ways in which narratives, rituals, and symbols can effect social transformations. He has written extensively on various aspects of apocalypticism, and his book An Apocalyptic History of the Early Fatimid Empire is the inaugural volume of Edinburgh University Press’s series on Islamic Eschatology and Apocalypticism.

Velji holds A Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, an M.A. in Islamic Studies from McGill University, and a B.A. in Religion from Haverford College.

Erika Dyson specializes in American religious history, with an emphasis on science and religion. Dyson examines topics such as the interfaces between occult religions and technologies; intersections between social-change activism and religion; and American religious history. She teaches courses on American religious culture; activism, social justice and religion; the history of science and religion in the U. S. from the nineteenth century to the present; world and transnational religions; as well as a unique class called “Ghosts and the Machines” that explores the interrelations between occult mediumship, modern media, and technology.

Ahmed Alwishah is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pitzer College, Claremont Colleges and a life member of Clare Hall College at Cambridge University. His research focuses on Islamic Philosophy and Philosophy of Language in Islamic tradition. He is the co-editor of Aristotle and the Arabic Tradition, Cambridge Press 2015, Illuminationist Texts and Textual Studies, Brill 2017, and Ibn Kammūna Refinement and Commentary of Suhrawardī’s Intimations ((Mazda, 2002). He also published “Suhrawardī and Ibn Kammūna on the Impossibility of Having Two Necessary Existents,” in Illuminationist Texts and Textual Studies “Avicenna on Animal Self-Awareness, Cognition and Identity” Cambridge Journal of Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 2016; “Taftazānī on the Liar Paradox, co-authored with David Sanson, Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 2016; “Ibn Sīnā on Floating Man Arguments,” Journal of Islamic Philosophy, 2013; “Avicenna On Self-Cognition and Self-Awareness,” in Aristotle and Arabic Tradition, Cambridge Press 2015; “The Early Arabic Liar: The Liar Paradox in the Islamic World from the Mid- Ninth to the Mid-Thirteenth Centuries CE,” co-authored with David Sanson, Vivarium Journal 2009. Forthcoming: “Avicenna On Perception, Cognition, and Mental Disorders: the Case of Hallucination,” a chapter in The Aristotelian Tradition: Sense-perception, ed. Christina Thomsen Thörnqvist and Juhana Toivanen, full edited and submitted to the editors and to be submitted to Brill.  Work in progress: Philosophy of Mind in Arabic Tradition.

Carina Johnson is a historian of the early modern world.  At Pitzer College, she is a member of the Religious Studies, History, and Gender and Feminist Studies field groups.  Her research and teaching focuses on cultural exchange in the early modern world, particularly across the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

She has two ongoing research projects.  The first, Homefront Experiences of the Habsburg-Ottoman Wars, 1470-1620, looks beyond the Islamophobia promoted by sixteenth-century German political and religious elites to explore the lived experiences of ordinary soldiers and refugees. The second, Matters of Appearance: Identity Markers in Sixteenth-Century Europe examines the early modern European use of cultural markers to deduce collective identity in a natio (nation), prior to the concept of biological race.

She’s the author of Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (2008) and co-editor of Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517-2017 (2017). She received her PhD and MA in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and her BA in archeological studies and history from Yale University.

Oona Eisenstadt specializes in continental philosophy and Judaism, with a special interest in two postmodern Jewish philosophers—Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. She has also focused extensively on religious themes in literature for children and young adults.

Jerry Irish teaches and researches in the areas of: Philosophical and Liberation Theologies and Process Thought, especially with respect to Social Justice and Environmental issues.

Zhiru Ng received a BA from National Singapore University, an MA from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and a PhD from the University of Arizone. Professor Ng specializes in Chinese Buddhist history and art, Buddhist cults with special focus on Dizang (Jizo) Bodhisattva, Buddhist cross-cultural interactions, interface between texts and images, and Taiwanese Buddhist modernity.

Professor Ng has received numerous awards and fellowships, including: Visiting Research Fellow, Material Textual Culture Project and Stone Buddhist Texts Project at the University of Heidelberg (2012), Outstanding Women in Buddhism Award from the OWBA Foundation: Bangkok (2010), Asia Research Institute Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore (2009-10), the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Scholar Grant (2008-09), the Graves Award for Excellence in Teaching (2004-05), Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions (2003-2004), and the Dean’s Fellow Award at the University of Arizona (1998).

Professor Ng has also published extensively, including most recently: “From Bodily Relic to Dharma Relic Stupa: Chinese Materialization of the Asoka Legend in Tenth-century Southeast China,” in India in the Chinese Imagination, edited by John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); “The Architectural and Religious Functions of Baoqieyin Dharani-sutra Manuscripts at Leifeng Pagoda in Tenth-Century Hangzhou,” with a Japanese translation by Yamano Chieko, in Strategic Research Project of Japanese Manuscripts of Buddhist Scriptures and the International College for Postgraduate Buddhist Studies, eds., Manuscripts in the Kongo-ji Collection: The Bao qie yin tuoluoni jing, Bibliotheca Codicologica Nipponica VI (Tokyo:, 2013); “Contextualizing Buddhist Approaches to Religious Diversity: When and How Buddhist Intellectuals Address Confucianism and Daoism (3rd–9th c.),” in Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought, edited by Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Joachim Gentz (Palgrave, 2013); “Scriptural Authority: A Buddhist Perspective,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 30: 85-105, 2010; “Buddhist Responses to State Control of Religion in China at the Century’s Turn,” in Buddhist Approaches to Human Rights: Dissonances and Resonances, edited by Carmen Meinert and Hans-Bernd Zöllner (Transcript-verlag, 2010); The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva: Dizang in Medieval China. Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism Series no. 21. Published in cooperation with University of Hawai’i, 2007

Erin Runions’s research focuses on the Hebrew Bible and its reception history, with special attention to the influence of the Bible on contemporary culture and politics. In her work, she demonstrates the cumulative effect of biblical reception on sexuality, biopolitics, racialization, governance, war, torture and U.S. imperialism. Her publications include, The Babylon Complex: Theopolitical Fantasies of War, Sex, and Sovereignty (2014); How Hysterical: Identification and Resistance in the Bible and Film (2003); Changing Subjects: Gender, Nation, Future in Micah (2001).

Runions has also been an activist for many years, working on issues of police brutality and prison injustice, globalization, antiwar activism, feminist and queer organizing. She currently helps facilitate a writing workshop inside a women’s prison and is working on issues of environmental justice in the nearby city of Pomona.

Darryl Smith specializes in philosophy of religion, African American letters and theology and American pragmatism. He is also a faculty member of The Claremont Colleges Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies.

Education: BA, Wheaton College; MA, Wheaton College; MTS, Boston College; ThM, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology; PhD, Fordham University

Teaching: Introduction to Early Christianities; Feminist Interpretations of the Bible; Queer African Christianities; Eros and Sex: Antiquity and Byzantium; Premodern African Christian Spiritualities; Conquered and Colonized Christianities; Jesus, Paul, and Early Christian Sexualities; Christianity, Capital, and Communism; Early Christian-Muslim Relations; Queering Christian Mysticism

Research: Premodern Christianity at the intersection of Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe; ancient African Christianities (Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia); gender and sexuality in premodern Christianity; Christian mysticism; Christian-Muslim relations in the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates