News
March 21, 2012 -- As part of the CDTR film series In The Names Of Gods, Colin Waugh and Eric Strauss were interviewed on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show on Wednesday, 3/21, discussing forgiveness in war-torn African nations.
March 15, 2012 -- CDTR Announces the Winners of the 2012 PhD Seed Grant Competition
The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR) is happy to announce the winners of its 2012 field research grants. Joseph Blankholm (PhD candidate, Religion) will carry out research in the US on trends and tensions within organizations that represent non-believers and Jared Conrad-Bradshaw (PhD candidate, Sociology) will research desecularization among businessmen and business associations in Kayseri, Turkey.
In addition to these two awards, Dr. Jack Snyder's Religion and Human Rights pragmatism project has awarded travel grants to two exceptional PhD candidates working on projects related to religion and human rights. Huma Kidwai (Teachers College) will carry out field research in India on religious educational reform and Alex Smolak (Social Work) will research Islam, female circumcision and HIV risk in Mali.
Funding for these grants is provided by the Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion and International Affairs.
David tells the story of Daud, an eleven year old religious Muslim boy growing up in Brooklyn. Concealing his Muslim identity, Daud inadvertently befriends a group of Jewish boys who through a haphazard sequence of events mistake him for being Jewish and accept him as one of their own. A genuine bond of friendship is formed between Daud and the Jewish boys. Can he maintain his charade, or will he end up rejected and alone?
February 24, 2012 -- Full video of CDTR's February 3-4 conference, Mormonism and American Politics, is now available on the website of our sister center, The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Watch it here.
February 23, 2012 -- Mohsin Mohi-Ud Din discusses Prof. Alfred Stepan's work on Muslim democracies like Indonesia in a piece in the Huffington Post.
February 21, 2012 -- Prof. Alfred Stepan's latest Project Syndicate piece, "Africa's Imperiled Democracy" (co-written with Columbia University fellow Etienne Smith) is being published around the globe, including The Korea Times and Gulf News.
February 16, 2012 -- Prof. Lila Abu-Lughod, primary investigator on CDTR project "Who's Afraid of Shari'a?" is interviewed on Jadaliyya about her new volume, SOCIALDIFFERENCE-ONLINE.
February 5, 2012 -- CDTR and IRCPL's conference Mormonism and American Politics is covered on the political blog of New York City public radio station WNYC.
January 13, 2012 -- CDTR Director Alfred Stepan has an opinion piece published online by Freedom House on the influence of the military on post-revolution politics in Egypt. Read it here.
December 27, 2011 --CDTR director Alfred Stepan is cited in an article in Turkish newspaper Today's Zaman about the rise and success of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Turkey is the subject of much CDTR research and many events.
December, 2011 -- CDTR project "Who's Afraid of Shari'a" is honored to have papers from its spring 2011 conference, Religious Law, Local Practice, and Global Debates about Muslim Women’s Rights: The Politics of Consent included in the first volume of SocialDifference-online, published by the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference. The volume is available for download here.
November 28, 2011 -- CDTR announces the details of our 2011/2012 PhD Seed Grants.
Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR) Seed Grants for PhD Field Research
Application Deadline: Monday, February 28, 2012 by 5 pm
Each year, the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR) awards grants to Columbia University PhD candidates to assist in writing their
dissertation proposals. This is a critical time in which students can carry out exploratory work
in order to arrive at a final design on their research project. By providing them with guidance
and critical funds, we hope awardees will be able to identify sources of underutilized material
especially relevant to their dissertation, attempt to gain access to it, and find a supportive
institutional base with which to affiliate. Funds will be used for field research before writing a
PhD dissertation research proposal and before applying to such prestigious and well-funded field
research grants as the SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship and the Fulbright
program. Fulbright, and to a slightly less extent, SSRC, seldom awards doctoral field research
grants to people who cannot discuss the organizations they will work with in the field during the
research. Funding for these grants is provided by the Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion and
International Affairs to SIPA.
Applications for 2012 fellowships are due Monday, February 28, 2012 by 5 pm. Please e- mail or deliver applications to Melissa Van (mav2121@columbia.edu), 420 W. 118th St., Room 815, MC 3355, New York, NY 10027. Awards will be announced by March 19, 2012.
Two grants of $3,000 are available for Summer or Fall 2012 to Columbia University PhD candidates who are preparing proposals or conducting research for doctoral projects related to religion and international affairs, religion and democracy, religion and social integration, or related topics. In addition to funding, CDTR will offer assistance in identifying underutilized material relevant to awardees’ dissertation topics and finding a supportive institutional base for field research. In the 2010/2011 academic year, students are expected to make oral presentations on the results of their research.
Eligibility: Applications are welcome from students in Ph.D., J.S.D. and Ed.D. programs at Columbia’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Law School, or Teachers College, who will have completed their comprehensive exams by Fall 2012. Preference is given to students who are doing international research and need to travel abroad. In compelling cases, travel within the U.S. to consult archives or conduct research in particular communities is considered.
Application: Please provide 1) a letter of reference from a faculty member who will serve on your dissertation committee; 2) a three-page description of the research project, which includes travel plans and a schedule for completion of the dissertation; 3) an itemized budget; and 4) a curriculum vitae. Please include your departmental affiliation and up-to-date contact information.
For more information contact Melissa Van, Assistant Director: (212)854-7813.
Application deadline is Monday, February 28, 2011 by 5 PM.
November 10, 2011 -- CDTR Director Alfred Stepan was at the offices of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Tunis, Tunisia, delivering a lecture titled, "Religion and Politics in Tunisia's Transition: Comparative Perspectives." More information on the Center's work on Tunisia's democratic transition is available here.
November 3, 2011 -- CDTR Director Alfred Stepan is discussed in Stephen A. Cook's piece on the Council of Foreign Relations' blog titled "Egypt: Supra-Constitutional Principles?"
October 1, 2011 -- Audio of the 9/21/11 discussion between Professor Marcus Mietzner (Australia National University), Prof. Alfred Stepan (Columbia), and more (moderated by Professor Ann Marie Murphy) about the state of Indonesia's decade-long program of decentralization is now available online. Click here to listen.
September/October 2011 -- Jack Snyder's Religion and International Relations Theory is reviewed in Foreign Affairs.
July/August 2011 -- Karen Barkey reviews Olivier Roy's Holy Ignorance in Foreign Affairs.
August 1, 2011 -- Denis Lacorne, Director of Research at Sciences Po and former IRCPL Visiting Scholar in Residence, has his book Religion in America: A Political History favorably reviewed in The Financial Times. The book was published as part of the Religion, Culture, and Public Life series.
May 23, 2011 -- Alfred Stepan quoted on CNN.com in discussion about Tunisia.
May 12, 2011 -- Alfred Stepan pens op-ed about the prospects for democratic transition in Egypt and Tunisia Project Syndicate, published on Al Jazeera's arabic service, among others.
April 15, 2011 -- CDTR announces the winners of its 2011 seed grants. Find their names and project titles listed below.
Jonathan Blake - Religious Rituals and Violence
In his project, Blake plans to explore the connection between religion and violence. Often discussed in passing, it is a topic that deserves serious academic scrutiny it has not received up to this point. He hopes to address many questions with his research, including: Are politics brought explicitly into religious rituals via the display of political symbols, political sermons, the participation of politicians? Are there observable differences between the religious practice of nationalist actors versus non-nationalist actors? Do rituals tend to have emotional crescendos that could be steered towards violence? With CDTR’s help, Blake will spend the summer of 2011 traveling Israel and Palestine, observing religious rituals, visiting contested religious sites, and interviewing a variety of actors, including politico-religious elites in both Israel and Palestine.
Elizabeth Sperber - Deus ex Machina? Identity and Institutional Change in sub-Saharan Africa
Surveying Zambia’s political landscape, Sperber sees the profound influence of religion, but uneven religious activism in politics. Some churches fully mobilize their flocks, while others abstain. Churches frequently splinter into sub-factions, and religious leaders form whole new churches with some regularity. With her CDTR field grant, Sperber will be conducting extensive field work in Zambia, investigating why politico-religious actors invest their time and energy in reforming existing churches and founding new ones. What is their relationship to politics? To transnational religious networks? She hopes to shed light on these movements, and deconstruct the process of institutional creation, competition, and collaboration through which people navigate religious. Ethnic, and political identity.
Pavithra Suryanarayan - Political Representation and the Rise of the Neo-Liberal State in India
There is a commonly held idea that extension of political enfranchisement to marginalized groups results in greater governmental emphasis on redistributive policies. But does this hold true? In her project, Pavithra Suryanarayan will investigate this idea through the lens of domestic Indian politics. In fact, Suryanarayan argues, the rise of political action by India’s lower castes in the 1970s was followed by a contraction of the welfare state. Suryanarayan will be working in India during the summer of 2011 with the help of CDTR, investigating her ideas. She hopes to develop a doctoral thesis around this idea, expanding it into a general theory about the effects of political equalization in societies with non-economic paradigms of equality.
CDTR ANNOUNCES 2010 SEED GRANT WINNERS
The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR) is happy to announce the winners of its 2010 field research grants. Emily Bech (PhD candidate, Political Science) will carry out primary survey research in Denmark for her tentatively titled dissertation, “Withdrawal or Engagement? Immigrant Civic Integration in Denmark and Sweden”, and Seth Anziska (PhD candidate, History) will visit Israel and Lebanon to explore archival holdings and conduct oral history interviews for his dissertation, currently titled, “Reagan’s Bequest: Cold War Revival and American Misadventures in the Middle East, 1981-1988.”
Funding for these grants is provided by the Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion and International Affairs. CDTR’s research seed grants provide funds to two exceptional PhD candidates who are nearing the end of the second year of their PhD work. This is a critical time in which students can carry out exploratory research in order to arrive at a final design on their research project. By providing them with guidance and critical funds, we hope awardees will be able to identify sources of underutilized material especially relevant to their dissertation, attempt to gain access to it, and find a supportive institutional base with which to affiliate.
Shlomo Bolts, an IRCPL Undergraduate Fellow and CDTR research assistant, won a prestigious Gates Scholarship Award for postgraduate study at Cambridge University in academic year 2010/2011. Shlomo's undergraduate honors thesis was also accepted for presentation ata poster session of the Midwest Political Science Association's annual conference in April, 2010.
The Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR) at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs is pleased to announce renewed funding from the Henry R. Luce Initiative in Religion and International Affairs, launched by the Henry Luce Foundation in 2005 to deepen understanding of religion as a critical but often neglected dimension of national and international policies and politics.
Renewed funding has allowed CDTR to embark on a new three-year initiative on how religion may encourage or discourage democratic practice and human rights, and how religious and secular actors can come together to implement and increase the effectiveness of human rights initiatives and women’s rights.
CDTR’s new three-year project will fund a number of opportunities for graduate and PhD students engaged in the study of religion and international affairs, including seed grants for research, a PhD thesis series on religion and politics, and summer intensives. Please check back soon for more information on these programs.
For more information about the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion, and its new initiatives, please contact Melissa Van, Assistant Director, CDTR, 212-854-7813, mav2121@columbia.edu.