From January 2026 onward. For the summary of entries from June to December 2025, see our 2025 December Roundup DSR Newsletter.
March 2026
Dr. Jamie Marsella joins the DSR as Assistant Professor of Religion, Medicine, and Healing as of July 1. She will also teach in the Public Health program at University College. Dr. Marsella’s research focuses on religion, gender, and medicine in the United States. She is currently the Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University, where she teaches in the Department of Religion. Her current book project examines the role of domestic science, religion, and eugenics in Progressive Era public health and child welfare movements in the United States. She has published her research in a wide range of venues, including Signs, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Teen Vogue, and Nursing Clio. Dr. Marsella holds a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard University and an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago. Welcome, Dr. Marsella!
Congratulations to PhD candidate Ian Turner, who was awarded a two-year SSHRC Canada Postdoctoral Research Award to be held at the University of Oxford, Faculty of Theology and Religion, under the supervision of Dr. Sondra Hausner, Professor of Anthropology of Religion. The project, entitled: “Homing in on the Housing Crisis: A religious studies approach,” will investigate how shared projects of homemaking in Nepal lead to different formations of religious collectivity in a period of displacement, social fragmentation, and housing insecurity, especially in areas put at risk by environmental degradation.
January 2026
Guldana Salimjan's project, “Digitizing Settler Colonial Histories in China’s Northwestern Frontier,” has been selected for the Jackman Scholars-in-Residence (SiR) 2026 program. SiR is an intensive, 4-week paid research fellowship in humanities and humanistic social-science research for upper-year undergraduates. Salimkan’s project asks how bureaucratic textual practices—such as gazetteers, annotated indexes of local geographic, biographic, and chronological information—codify territorial expansion, institutional control, and the ideological labor of frontier settlement? And how can digital humanities methodologies make these materials accessible for new forms of analysis? >> About the SiR program