2020 Cohort

Check out the amazing public scholarship being done by our 2020 training cohort, including this amazing interview series with the Classical Ideas Podcast.

SWATI Chawla
O.P. Jindal Global University

Swati Chawla (she/her/hers) is assistant professor at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University (Sonipat, India), and a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia. Her doctoral research is focused on migration, citizenship-making, and contemporary Buddhisms in the Himalayan regions of postcolonial South Asia. Her masters and M.Phil. work focused on the Tibetan Buddhist female monastic tradition in exile. She hosts the Twitter channel #himalayanhistories. She holds B.A., M.A., and M.Phil. degrees in English from the University of Delhi, where she also taught as an Assistant Professor of English.

ambre Dromgoole
Yale University

Ambre Dromgoole (she/her/hers) is a doctoral candidate in the Departments of Religious Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. She graduated from Oberlin College & Conservatory in 2015 with a B.A. in Musical Studies and Religion, where she received the Jonathon Kneeland Prize for Religion and the Africana Studies Award for Artistic Excellence and Community Service upon graduation. She then obtained an M.A. in Religion from Yale Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music with a concentration in Black Religion and the Arts receiving the Hugh Porter Prize of Distinction. Ambre is interested in the convergence of Black religion and popular culture, focusing on the emergence of various musical genres from women in the Black Holiness-Pentecostal tradition.

EricKa Dunbar
spelman College

Ericka Shawndricka Dunbar (she/her/hers) is an adjunct professor at Spelman College (Atlanta, GA) in the Religious Studies Department. She received her Ph.D. in Biblical Studies (Old Testament) in May 2020 from Drew University. Her dissertation is interdisciplinary and focused on how the discipline of biblical studies is increasingly responsive to social issues, namely, sexual trafficking.  Dunbar’s dissertation, entitled “Trafficking Hadassah: An Africana Reading of Collective Trauma, Memory, and Identity in the Book of Esther and the African Diaspora,” is a dialogical cultural study of sexual trafficking in the book of Esther and during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. She assesses sexual trafficking in both contexts, evaluates the traumatic impact of trafficking on Africana collective identity, and examines and critiques ideologies and stereotypes that were espoused to justify sexual abuse against Africana girls and women.  

Lynne Gerber
independent Scholar

Lynne Gerber (she/her/hers) is an independent scholar. She is the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual-Reorientation in Evangelical America (Chicago, 2011). She is currently working on a history of religion and HIV/AIDS in San Francisco.

abel gómez
syracuse University

Abel R. Gómez (he/him/his) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religion Department and earned a Certificate of Advanced Studies from the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University. His research focuses on sacred sites, ritual, and decolonization in the context of contemporary Indigenous religions. Abel is currently completing his dissertation, an ethnography of sacred sites protection movements among the Ohlone peoples of the San Francisco and Monterey regions. He is a steering committee member for the Native Traditions in the Americas Unit of the American Academy of Religion and recently served on the committee organizing the annual Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits Powwow in San Francisco. He earned a B.A. in philosophy and religion from San Francisco State University and an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Missouri.

Suzanna Krivulskaya
California State University San Marcos

Suzanna Krivulskaya (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of History at California State University San Marcos, where she teaches courses in U.S. and digital history. She received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in modern U.S. history and studies the relationship between sexuality and religion. Her current book project, tentatively titled Disgraced: How Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism, investigates how pastoral sex scandals have been covered in the popular press and how Protestant denominations and the reading public responded to the coverage. Her articles have been published by the Journal of American Studies, Current Research in Digital History, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Her chapter on fundamentalist sex and sexuality is forthcoming from the Oxford Handbook of Christian Fundamentalism. She has published in popular outlets like Religion Dispatches and Religion in American History, and the Revealer. She is also the recipient of the 2019-2020 LGBTQ Religious History Award from the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network.

shaily patel
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Shaily Patel (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Early Christianity at Virginia Tech. She is an expert on ancient magic, early Christian literature, and ideological criticisms of the New Testament. She is currently writing a book about the ways in which early Christian writings featuring Simon Peter are caught between two simultaneous but opposing cultural trends: the allure of “magic” in the Roman imagination and the categorial vilifying of magicians among ancient writers. In her wider work, she is concerned with the problem of representation in historical accounts, especially the representation of groups and ideas that challenge established “orthodoxy.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: New public scholarship training cohort selected; remote training model announced (1 July 2020)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Public scholarship training cohort selected (18 February 2020)