Faculty

×

Dominique Townsend, Director

Affiliations:  Experimental Humanities, Asian Studies, Philosophy
Primary Teaching and Research Interests: Buddhism, Tibetan and Himalayan Studies, Buddhist Poetry, Aesthetics and Education

B.A., Barnard College; M.T.S Harvard Divinity School; Ph.D. Columbia University. Previously taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, and NYU and held the position of Head of Interpretation at the Rubin Museum of Art from 2014-2016. Publications include: A Buddhist Sense of Beauty: Culture and Knowledge at a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery (in process); “Buddhism’s Worldly Other: Secular subjects in Tibetan Buddhist learning,” in Himalaya: The Journal for the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 2016; Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero, (Wisdom Publications, 2015); The Weather & Our Tempers, (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013). Primary language of research is Tibetan; Fellowships include: de Bary Postdoctoral Research Fellowship; Whiting Dissertation Fellowship: Charles H. Smith Fellowship at Harvard Divinity School. At Bard since 2016. 

×

Karen Barkey

Karen Barkey’s research has been engaged in the comparative and historical study of the state, with special focus on its transformation over time. Her work has explored state society relations, peasant movements, banditry, and opposition and dissent organized around the state. Her main empirical site has been the Ottoman Empire, in comparison with France and the Habsburg and Russian Empires. She also pays attention to the Roman and Byzantine worlds as important predecessors of the Ottomans. Her book Empire of Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2008) explores issues such as diversity, the role of religion in politics, Islam and the state as well as the manner in which the Sunni-Shi’a divide operated during the tenure of the Ottoman Empire—topics that remain relevant today. Barkey, who was born in Istanbul, is also coauthor of Choreography of Sacred Spaces: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution (Columbia University Press, 2014), which explores the history of shared religious spaces in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine/Israel, regions once under Ottoman rule. Recent publications include Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism: India, Pakistan and Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Shared Sacred Sites: A Contemporary Pilgrimage (City University of New York Publications, 2018). Barkey was awarded the Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean Studies, IMéRA, Marseille for 2021–2022, and has served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity at the Othering and Belonging Institute; director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion; and codirector of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion. She also taught at Columbia University, where she was director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

BA, Bryn Mawr College; MA, University of Washington; PhD, University of Chicago. At Bard since 2021.

×

Bevin Blaber

Bevin Blaber is a scholar of philosophy of religions. Her work centers on continental philosophy, ethics, and modern Jewish thought and literature, with particular emphasis on post-Holocaust thought. In her first monograph, an interdisciplinary project combining philosophical, literary and historical analyses, she examines French philosopher and theorist Maurice Blanchot’s earliest work: articles published in right-wing French journals in the years preceding World War II. Her current work explores ways that conceptions of guilt and atonement are figured in instances of state or community-perpetrated atrocities, and the impact of these definitions on attempts, both legal and extra-juridical, to grapple with legacies of these events. She has previously taught at the University of Chicago and Grinnell College.
BA, Williams College; AM, PhD, University of Chicago Divinity School. Also studied at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, where she was Visiting Dissertation Research Fellow. At Bard since 2022

×

Bruce Chilton

Affiliations: Institute for Advanced Theology (Director), Theology, Medieval Studies, Jewish Studies
Primary Teaching and Research Interests: Early Christianity and Judaism, Liberation Theology

B.A., Bard College; M.Div., General Theological Seminary, ordination to the diaconate and the priesthood; Ph.D., Cambridge University. Books includeAbraham’s Curse; Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography; God in Strength; Rabbi Paul: An Intellectual Biography; Judaic Approaches to the Gospels; Mary Magdalene: A Biography; Revelation; Trading Places; Jesus’ Prayer and Jesus’ Eucharist; Forging a Common Future; and Jesus’ Baptism and Jesus’ Healing.Editor in chief, Bulletin for Biblical Research; founding editor, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Studying the Historical Jesus series (E. J. Brill and Eerdmans). Fellowships and awards: with Jacob Neusner, Choice magazine award, best academic book (1998); Evangelical Scholars Fellowship, Whitney Humanities Center (Yale University); Heinrich Hertz Stiftung, Theological Develop­ment Fund of the Episcopal Church, National Conference of Christians and Jews. At Bard since 1987.  

×

Claire-Marie Hefner

Dr. Claire-Marie Hefner's research is based in the largest Muslim-majority country in the world, Indonesia. Her interests lie in the study of gender, morality, education, embodiment, youth studies, and new media in the Muslim world. She has traveled to Indonesia almost every year since 1999. Her current book project, Achieving Islam: Women, Piety, and Moral Play in Indonesian Muslim Boarding Schools, is based off of over two years of ethnographic research in two Islamic schools for girls where she lived, attended class, and spent time on leisure outings with students. Her recent publications have been featured in Asian Studies Review, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and American Ethnologist. She also has a background in Classical Balinese dance and gamelan, from the Hindu-majority island of Bali, as well as Classical Indian Dance (Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi).
 
Dr. Hefner completed her BA in Cultural Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Emory University in Atlanta, GA. At Bard since 2022. 

×

Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed

Affiliations: Religion, Middle Eastern Studies, Medieval Studies, Philosophy 
Primary Teaching and Research Interests: Islamic Theology and Philosophy, Illuminationism, the Occult Sciences

Professor Jacobsen Ben Hammed’s research focuses on medieval Islamic philosophy with a primary concentration on the continued life of Islamic philosophy as it was absorbed and transformed in Islamic theology and mysticism. She earned her doctorate in Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where her dissertation addressed “Knowledge and Felicity of the Soul in Fakhr al-Din al-Razi.” Her published work includes articles in such journals as Oriens, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, and the Journal of Persianate Studies, as well as forthcoming book chapters in the edited volumes Mysticism and Ethics in Islam (American University of Beirut Press, 2021) and Women's Contemporary Readings of Medieval Arabic Thought (Springer, 2021). Her current book project addresses the eminent 12th century Muslim theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s engagement with the Islamic philosophical movement and his gradual development of a notion of a two-fold path to knowledge of God and thus of felicity of the soul through knowledge. BA, Yale University; MA, Yale Divinity School; PhD., University of Chicago Divinity School. At Bard since 2019.

×

Nabanjan Maitra

Primary teaching and research interests: Asceticism, ritual hermeneutics, & ritual practice, Sanskrit intellectual history, history of Hinduism, Hindu nationalism

B.A., University of Virginia; A.M. and Ph.D., University of Chicago, Divinity School. Previously taught at the University of Texas, Austin and Columbia University. Nabanjan Maitra’s research focuses on tracing the premodern roots of modern Hinduism. In particular, he is interested in the emergence of monasteries as institutional centers for the formulation and governance of religious doctrine and practice. His work attempts to unearth the hidden history of ascetic power, highlighting its role in the emergence of Hindu reform movements in the colonial period. He is currently working on a book project, on this topic, titled “The Rebirth of Homo Vedicus: Institutional Vedānta and the Emergence of Modern Hinduism.” Dr. Maitra’s work is forthcoming in the Journal of South Asian Intellectual History, and The Monastic Dimension of Identity Politics (ARC Humanities Press). Dr. Maitra has also written for a more general public in JSTOR Daily. Grants and awards received include, among others, a Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship at the University of Chicago; Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Fellowship, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, India; and Committee on South Asian Studies Fellowship, India. At Bard since 2022.

×

Shai Secunda

Affiliations: Jewish Studies
Primary Teaching and Research Interests: Rabbinic Literature, Classical Judaism, Women’s Studies & Judaism, Middle Persian Literature, Zoroastrianism, Eastern Late Antiquity, & Orality

Bachelors in Talmudic Literature, Ner Israel Rabbinical College; Masters in Liberal Arts, Johns Hopkins University; M.A and Ph.D, Yeshiva University (Iranian Studies at Harvard University). Has taught at Yale, where he served as a Blaustein Postdoctoral Fellow; and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he served as a Mandel Scholion Fellow and a Martin Buber Society Fellow. Publications include the monograph The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in its Sasanian Context (Philadelphia, 2013); Encounters by the Rivers of Babylon: Scholarly Conversations Between Jews, Iranians and Babylonians in Antiquity (ed., with Uri Gabbay; Tübingen, 2014); and articles in Association of Jewish Studies Review; Bulletin of the Asia Institute; Iranica Antiqua; Jewish Quarterly Review; Jewish Studies Quarterly; and Studia Iranica(with Domenico Agostini and Eva Kiesele). Languages include Hebrew, Aramaic, and Persian. He is a member of the Association of Jewish Studies and the International Society of Iranian Studies. At Bard since 2016.