Meet the authors of the 62-1 issue, January 2020
Amy Chazkel is Bernard Hirschhorn Associate Professor of Urban Studies in the Department of History at Columbia University. She is the author of Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of Urban Public Life in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2011), which was published in Portuguese as Leis da sorte: O jogo do bicho e a construção da via pública urbana (Editora da Unicamp, 2014). She co-edited The Rio de Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2016). She is currently completing “Rio de Janeiro and the Politics of Nightfall” (Oxford University Press), a history of the urban nighttime from the perspective of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. She is part of the Radical History Review Editorial Collective.
Samuel Sami Everett (who goes by Sami) is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from SOAS, University of London and a BA in North African Language and Culture from INALCO, Paris. His research focuses on the historical-colonial and spatial-political dimensions of interreligious identification to North Africa. He is particularly interested in the similarities and differences in migratory and post-migratory experiences between Jewish and Muslim descendants of North Africa and their present-day sites of encounter. His research practice has involved multilingual ethnography in complex urban settings (Algiers, Casablanca, Jerusalem, and Paris) and tracking how intercultural and interreligious encounters are mediated through localized market relations. In Paris, he is associated the CNRS-EPHE Groupe Sociétés, Religions et Laïcités (GSRL), and he is working on a research project that presents a portrait of French initiatives in favor of Jewish-Muslim dialogue (2019–2020).
Thushara Hewage is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Ottawa. He is an historical anthropologist of South Asia whose work focuses on nationalism, democracy, and postcolonial political theory.
Gale Kenny is an Assistant Professor in the Religion Department at Barnard College. Her research has examined questions of religion, colonialism, and the transnational antislavery movement, and her current book project, “Christian Cosmopolitans: Protestant Churchwomen and the World,” explores twentieth-century black and white U.S. women’s gendered Protestant modernism and political activism. She has published articles in Slavery and Abolition, the Journal of the Civil War Era, and Religion and American Culture. Her first book, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2010.
Michal Kravel-Tovi is an Associate Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology at Tel Aviv University. Her work focuses on political dimensions of contemporary religious Jewish life. Her book on Jewish conversion, When the State Winks: The Performance of Jewish Conversion in Israel (Columbia University Press, 2017) received in 2018 the second prize of the Clifford Geertz Prize Award of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion section within the American Anthropological Association, and won the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award of the Association for Jewish Studies in the Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore category.
David Mosse is Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London. His research ranges across the anthropology of religion, the environment, and international development. He is author of The Saint in the Banyan Tree: Christianity and Caste Society in India (University of California Press, 2012); Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice (Pluto Press, 2005) ; and The Rule of Water: Statecraft, Ecology and Collective Action in South India (Oxford University Press, 2003). He has recently undertaken a collaborative research project, “Caste out of Development,” concerned with civil society activism and transnational advocacy for Dalit rights and development. He is currently engaged in anthropological research on mental health care.
Catherine Wanner is a Professor of History and Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the politics of religion in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. She is the author of Burden of Dreams: History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Penn State University Press, 1998); Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Cornell University Press, 2007). She is co-editor (with Mark Steinberg) of Religion, Morality, and Community in Post-Soviet Societies (Indiana University Press, 2008); and editor of State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (Oxford University Press, 2012). She is currently writing a book on vernacular religious practices, entitled “From Smoke Comes Fire: An Ethnography of Faith, Belonging and Politics in Ukraine.”
Tisa Wenger is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Yale Divinity School, with secondary appointments in Religious Studies and American Studies at Yale. Her work has explored the cultural politics of religious freedom, the religious histories of the American West, and the intersecting formations of race, empire, and religion in U.S. history. Her books are We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Her current research asks how settler colonial encounters made and remade both indigenous and white settler religion in the early United States. For more information, see https://www.tisawenger.net/.
