From July to December 2025. Books, articles and web projects from faculty and students.
Books
A new book from Robert Gibbs, What Could a University Be? Revolutionary Ideas for the Future (UBC Press), was published in September, garnering considerable attention. An excerpt from the book, "In the Age of AI, Are Universities Doomed?", was published in The Walrus and a conversation with the author featured in the podcast Reinventing U which is produced by the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities.
Read the interview with Robert Gibbs
Professor Emeritus & J. Richard and Dorothy Shiff Chair of Jewish Studies Emeritus David Novak's most recent book is God-Talk: The Heart of Judaism, published by Bloomsbury's Rowman & Littlefield imprint. The author reports that he is now hard at work on his twenty-first book!
Affiliate faculty member Willi Goetschel's latest book, Difference and Alterity in La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn, is published by Edinburgh University Press, and traces a shared critical agenda highlighting the emancipatory force of difference and otherness.
Articles & Chapters (alphabetical by author/lead)
PhD candidate Michael Oluwatobiloba Ajayi's first international publication, the chapter “Decolonizing Anthropology in Africa: The Nigerian Experience,” appeared in Vocalizing Africa II: Perspectives on Knowledge Construction, Gender, Identity, and Pragmatic Representations in Africa (African Studies Institute, University of Georgia, USA).
Filip Andjelkovic’s chapter “Pirates (2005)” appeared in Screening Adult Cinema (Routledge).
PhD candidate Kyle Byron’s article, “Spiritual Reproduction: Christian Kinship Between Queer Theology and Family Values,” was published in American Religion, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2025.
The chapter by Ronald Charles, "Se déplacer entre les lieux et les disciplines,” appeared in Interpréter la Bible en Contextes Africains et Afro-Descendants (Presse de l’Université Laval).
Affiliate faculty Kamari Maxine Clarke’s trip to Colombia with five students as part of the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Research Excursions Program (REP), which provides students with opportunities to travel off-campus during the summer term to participate in an instructor’s research project, was the subject of this A&S story, “A new path to justice: Research program explores Colombia’s innovative peace model.”
Ken Derry's co-authored article, “Centipedes, AI, and Multiple Emilys: A Conversation about Pedagogy and the Study of Religion,” was published in Religious Studies Review 51.2 (2025)
Postdoctoral fellow Geethika Dharmasinghe published “The Fasting Monk, Islamophobia, and Episodic Violence in Sri Lanka,” in the American Anthropological Association’s magazine, Anthropology News, in the Society for the Anthropology of Religion section.
PhD candidate Christina Gousopoulos's article, “The Absence of the Afterlife: Eschatology, Belonging, and Self-Representation in Early Christian Epitaphs (II–VI A.D.),” was published in the Journal of Epigraphic Studies 8:191–208.
Alex Hampton's latest publication,“Nature, Culture and Creation: Nicholas of Cusa’s Participatory Metaphysics and Naming, Knowing and Making,” appeared in Theology and Science, 1–13. [online pre-publication]
Marsha Hewitt’s article, “You can’t console a video clip’: AI and the metaphysics of electronic presence”, was published in the American Psychoanalytic Association Council on Artificial Intelligence Report, Issue 5, July, 2025.
DSR affiliate faculty Tracy Lemos published "We Became Refuse and Rubbish’: Violence, Filth, and Rehumanization after Exile" in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament.
PhD candidate Christina Pasqua published an essay,”Old Forgotten Children’s Books?”, for James Bielo's Collecting Religion web project. She also had an essay, “Catholic Residue: The Aesthetic Legacy of The Exorcist,” in a special issue of the Journal of Gods and Monsters on the 50th anniversary of The Exorcist, which came out of a 2023 American Academy of Religion conference panel on the same topic.
DSR affiliate faculty member Miray Philips’s article, “The Social Construction of Christian Persecution through Quantification in International Religious Freedom Advocacy,” appeared in Sociology of Religion. Her related op-ed on the article, “Are Christians the Most Persecuted Religious Group Worldwide?,” appeared on Canopy Forum: On the Interactions of Law and Religion.
Alumna and sessional lecturer Eleanor Pontoriero's article, "Burning Refuge: Spiritual and Political Liberation in the Navayana Buddhist Movement," was published in the Journal of International Buddhist Studies (Vol.16 No.2 July-December 2025): 17-33.
Jeremy Schipper's article, “Ezekiel 29.6b-7 and Metaphorical Uses of Canes in the Hebrew Bible,” was published in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 50 (2025): 80-86.
Parnia Vafaeikia, who defended her PhD dissertation in July, released the second episode of the podcast series hosted at St. Michael’s and Emmanuel College, “Bridges and Boundaries: Reflections on Living and Educating in a Multifaith World.” This episode explores art and spirituality in the multireligious classroom context.
Web Projects
Frances Garrett’s SSHRC-funded project, Himalayan Borderlands, supported a project called “Discovering Sacred Lands,” for which the website has been launched. The project brought Indigenous youth of the Mutanchi Rongkup community together with Knowledge Keepers and encouraged them to reconnect with their ancestral roots. The intention was to experiment with channels and mediums to explore and rediscover relatedness of story and place within a Mutanchi Rongkup thought-framework.