From January to June 2025, appointments and achievements across the board by DSR members.
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Honours & Awards
Our much-loved graduate administrator, Feresteh Hashemi, received the 2025 Dean’s Distinguished Long Service Award. Distinguished by her professional ingenuity as much as by her practices of care, Fereshteh has earned the deep respect and gratitude of DSR graduate students, faculty, and staff, many of whom attended the Arts & Science ceremony and reception on June 2.
Amira Mittermaier was awarded a SSHRC Connections Grant, along with affiliate DSR faculty member Anver Emon and Schirin Amir-Moazami (Free University, Berlin), to support an international, interdisciplinary workshop titled "Islamophobia after October 7: Transatlantic Perspectives." The workshop will be held at U of T in October 2025. → More
Suleyman Dost was awarded a Jackman Humanities Institute Digital Humanities Fellowship for his project, “Bringing Order to Chaos: A Study of the Qur’an’s Inner Chronology.”
PhD candidate Mohannad Abusarah was awarded the prestigious Vivienne Poy Chancellor's Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences for 2025-2026. .
PhD student Michael Oluwatobiloba Ajayi was awarded a 2025-26 Connaught PhDs for Public Impact Fellowship. The program offers U of T doctoral students an opportunity to explore the world of public scholarship and to make connections outside the university through innovative forms of scholarly communication. Michael's project is a multimedia exhibition, "The Voices of Unity: Faces of the Vote," which examines how religion, ethnicity, and politics influence voter behaviour in Nigeria.
PhD student Poulami Das received the 2024 Canadian Friends of Sufi Arts, Culture, and Knowledge Research Award, for a project to share Sufi arts and culture with a broader audience, with a focus on the embodiment and material culture of shrines in Bengal.
Undergraduate student and Mediaeval Studies Specialist James Nowak won the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion Undergraduate Student Essay Prize, with “Regarding Creation: Praise, Visual Perception, and Double Movement in John Scottus Eriugena’s Periphyseon,” a paper he wrote in Professor Alexander J.B. Hampton’s course (this is the second year running that a student of Hampton’s has been awarded this prize). Our interview with James takes a look at his path to the study of religion as he reflects on the intellectual freedom he found in his classes.
Papers by PhD student Shashank Rao and Religion Major undergraduate Aneri Patel were award winners at the EIR-AAR conferene held in April 2025 at St Lawrence University. Shashank won the Graduate Student Paper Award with “Hindu Studies in the Time of Hindu Nationalism” and Aneri won the Undergraduate Student Paper Award with her paper, “Reimagining Sacred Space: The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor and the Mediation of Pilgrimage.”
Promotions & Appointments
Effective July 1, 2025 we are delighted to note the following promotions:
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| Reid Locklin is promoted to Full Professor | Libbie Mills is promoted to Associate Professor, Teaching Stream (part-time) |
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| J. Barton Scott is promoted to Full Professor | Ken Derry is promoted to Full Professor, Teaching Stream |
As of July 1, we are pleased to welcome Guldana Salimjan to the DSR and Historical & Cultural Studies at UTSC as assistant professor. Her research lies at the intersections of memory, colonialism, environment, and Indigenous and settler knowledge production. She holds a PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice from the University of British Columbia, and previously served as the Ruth Wynn Woodward Junior Chair in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University.
Srilata Raman ends her three-year term as Associate Chair Undergraduate, during which the DSR’s undergraduate office benefited enormously from her leadership and innovation. Taking over the reins at a time when the DSR's undergraduate courses and programs are flourishing, Amira Mittermaier will bring to the role the student-centered perspective developed during her 2016-2019 term as the Director of Graduate Studies.