The Classical Ideas Podcast

Swasti Bhattacharyya (PhD, RN) Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Religion, has been researching, writing, and teaching in religious studies and applied ethics for over two decades. She examines ethical issues from multiple philosophical and religious perspectives. Her work is rooted in her upbringing as a daughter of an immigrant Hindu father from India and a Japanese Buddhist mother born and ra...

Tess Starman (she/they) is a recent PhD graduate in Sociology at Howard University and is an incoming assistant professor at Simpson College. Her research specializes on intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power at the nexus of religion and politics. She studies progressive Christian attitudes, religious exiting, and religion's impact on political attitudes and engagement. We discuss her...

Rebecca Wolfe is a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University. Graduating with a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2024, Rebecca's research agenda focuses on the areas of gender, sexuality, the body, and mental health, particularly in the context of religion. Rebecca's dissertation work examined bodily experiences of disordered eating and sexual dy...

Dr. Celene Ibrahim is a multidisciplinary scholar specializing in Qur'anic studies, gender studies and interreligious relations. Her award-winning monograph Women and Gender in the Qur'an (Oxford University Press, 2020) received the Association of Middle East Women's Studies book prize and is being translated into multiple languages. She also authored Islam and Monotheism, an accessible primer on...

Amanda Hernandez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliate faculty member of the Feminist Studies and Race & Ethnicity Studies programs at Southwestern University. She is a proud graduate of San Antonio Community College. She received her B.A. in Women's & Gender Studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio, and her M.A. and Ph. D. in Sociology from Baylor University. Her work fo...

Dr. Sohini Sarah Pillai (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Religion, Director of Film and Media Studies, and the Marlene Crandell Francis Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Kalamazoo College. Her research interests include Hindu traditions, epic narratives, Indian cinema, and women in religion. She is the author of Krishna's Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative(Oxford Uni...

Formerly the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Calgary, Lucas is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto Mississauga. He is the author of At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Rutgers UP, 2025), which received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. He is also the editor of...

Tazeen M. Ali (she/her) is assistant professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching focus on Islam and gender, US Islam, and race and religion in America. She is the author of The Women's Mosque of America: Authority & Community in US Islam (NYU Press, 2022). She has also published in Religion & Politics (now ARC Mag), The Conversation , The May...

Alexiana Fry (she/her/hers) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen at the Faculty of Theology for a project entitled "Divergent Views of Diaspora in Ancient Judaism." Her first book, Trauma Talks in the Hebrew Bible: Speech Act Theory and Trauma Hermeneutics , released in October 2023 with Lexington Press. She received her Ph. D. in Old Testament from Stellenbosch University...

Peach (they/them) is a PhD student at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge and the Woolf Institute. They are conducting ethnographic research into the dynamics of resistance and compliance in women's interfaith organisations in the contemporary British public sphere. One of their key interests is how often-dismissed 'convivial' activities like crafting and food-sharing create condition...

Dana Lloyd is assistant professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies and affiliated faculty at the Center for Peace and Justice Education at Villanova University. She is the author of Land Is Kin: Sovereignty, Religious Freedom, and Indigenous Sacred Sites (University Press of Kansas, 2023) and the co-editor of American Examples: A New Conversation about Religion, vol. 3 (University of Alabama Pr...

Aisha R. Lovens (she/her/hers) is a PhD student in African American Preaching and Sacred Rhetoric at Christian Theological Seminary. She is a dynamic same-gender-loving minister, scholar-activist, womanist, and preacher committed to transformative theological inquiry. Her research centers on sex rhetoric in Black churches and theological institutions, with a particular emphasis on womanist theolog...

Kelsey Hanson Woodruff is a PhD candidate in Religion at Harvard University. Her dissertation is a historical and ethnographic study of digital communities of post-evangelical feminists in the twenty-first century. She is also writing a biography of millennial author Rachel Held Evans. Hanson Woodruff's work has been supported by the Louisville Institute, the SSRC's Religion, Spirituality and Demo...

Dr Angela Puca is an academic and a university lecturer who has taught at several universities worldwide and has been based at Leeds Trinity University since 2016. She holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in philosophy. In 2021, The University of Leeds awarded her a PhD in Religious Studies on Italian Witchcraft and Shamanism , published by Brill. Her research focuses on magic, witchcraft, Pag...

Shaonta' Allen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College. She also holds affiliations with the African and African American Studies Department and the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality. She received her B.A in Sociology from the University of Washington, her M.A. in Sociology and a graduate certificate in Women and Gender Studies from Middl...

Binu 'Ben' Varghese is a PhD student in religion and society at Princeton Theological Seminary. His research focuses on intersections of race, politics, and religion among Indian diasporas in transnational contexts. He draws his theoretical formulations from the colonial history of Dutch slavery in India and alternative readings of Indian American history and memories. In addition to his research...

SueJeanne Koh is the Graduate Futures Program Director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. She develops programming for humanities doctoral students focusing on professional development and diverse career pathways. She is also the Director of Adult Education and Resident Theologian for St. Mark and New Hope Presbyterian Churches (PC(USA)). In this capacity, she create...

Farha Ternikar (Ph. D., Sociology, M.A. Religious Studies) is the director of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at Le Moyne College, Syracuse. Her current manuscript "Faith and Food Networks: Muslim women's acts of resistance and resilience in the American Diaspora" examines how in addition to race and gender, global Islamophobia continues to play an important role in how we can understand the r...

Robert Monson is a writer, musician, and scholar that looks closely at Black and womanist theologies as well as Black disability theology. His work engages Black religious identities, Christian nationalism, disability, and more. He is currently a PhD student and is a host for two podcasts: Black Coffee and Theology and Three Black Men: Theology, Culture, and the World Around Us . Visit Robert Mons...

Natalie Avalos is an assistant professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado Boulder. She is an ethnographer of religion whose teaching and research examine Indigenous religious life, land-based ethics, healing historical trauma, and decolonization. She received her Ph. D. in Religious Studies from the University of California at San...

Emma Thompson is a Ph. D. candidate in the Islam subfield of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. They are also pursuing a graduate certificate from the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Their work focuses on Islam in South Asia along with Islam, Gender, and Sexuality. Their research draws on anthropological fieldwork and social media archives to examine how queer activists i...

Dr. Michael Brandon McCormack is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Pan-African Studies, Associate Professor of Comparative Humanities , and former Director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville. He earned his Ph. D. in Religion in 2013 from Vanderbilt University. His research explores the intersections between Black religion, popu...

Phoebe Farag Mikhail is a Coptic Orthodox Christian and the author of Putting Joy into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church (Paraclete Press). She holds an M.A. in International Education and is a lifelong learner of theology, currently taking courses at Pope Shenouda III Coptic Orthodox Theological Seminary in New Jersey. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners , Plough ,...

Dr. Strozier is a lecturer at Georgia State University. She is continuing her research in the areas of religion, gender, sexuality, and health focusing the disproportionality of black women's maternal mortality, and women's reproductive decisions, using digital platforms. Her pedagogical focus is anti-racist and decolonial teaching strategies, while shifting humanities curriculum to focus on profe...

Bhakti Mamtora (Ph. D., Religion, University of Florida) is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona. Broadly, her research interests include print culture, book history, migration, and transnational religion. Her current book project employs archival, textual, and ethnographic methods to examine the genesis and r...