#  WSRP Announces 2023–24 Research Associates 

 





April 07, 2023

 

 

Five new Research Associates will join the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at HDS to work on book-length projects during the 2023–24 academic year. By bringing together scholars from different disciplines and research areas, commonalities in religion and gender emerge.

While working on their projects, the WSRP Research Associates teach a one-semester course and deliver a lecture on their research.



 

 

 

University of Montana Western

### Jessica J. Fowler 

 

Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Catholicism

**Project title: Illuminating the Empire: The Spanish Inquisition and the Spread of Global Heresy, 1500-1700**

A trans-imperial study encompassing three continents, two centuries, and approximately four hundred cases, that illustrates how the Spanish Inquisition created a heresy and then set in motion a circumambulatory logic that fabricated heretical sects, led by women, out of inquisitorial fears and anxieties about women and their religiosity.



 



      ![Jessica Fowler WSRP RA](/sites/g/files/omnuum4861/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/hds_wsrp/files/jessica_fowler_0.jpg?itok=aUlzc-1f) 

 

 

  

 



Indiana University Bloomington

### Elena Herminia Guzman 

 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and African Diaspora Studies

**Project title: Chimera Geographies: Black Spiritual Borderland Performances of the Caribbean**

This project explores the way Black women and non-binary people through the Caribbean and its diaspora use spiritual and ritual performance within African Diasporic Religions, including Santeria, Haitian Vodou, Puerto Rican Espiritismo, 21 Divisions, and Obeah, as a means to forge interstitial geographies of the African diaspora.



 



      ![Elena Guzman WSRP RA](/sites/g/files/omnuum4861/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/hds_wsrp/files/elena_guzman_0.jpg?itok=aDbPpzRp) 

 

 

  

 



University of Colorado Boulder

### Samira K. Mehta 

 

Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and North American Religions  
Colorado Scholar

**Project title: God Bless the Pill: Contraception and Sexuality in Tri-Faith America**

This project traces the intertwined history of religion and contraception in the United States from the founding of Planned Parenthood’s first Clergy Committee in 1942 to the present. It draws from medical, feminist, legal, and political histories of contraception to demonstrate that whatever else these debates may have been about, they were, fundamentally, about religion.



 



      ![Samira Mehta WSRP RA](/sites/g/files/omnuum4861/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/hds_wsrp/files/samira_mehta_0.png?itok=koDwvjDe) 

 

 

  

 



Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, Tehran

### S. Zahra Moballegh 

 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Islam

**Project title: Narrating for Love and Change: Reading Women’s Stories in Search of a Feminist Qur’anic Narrator**

There are about 25 stories in the Qur’an in which one or more women have a role. A linguistic-narratological study of these stories supports new feminist approaches to the Qur’an by shedding light on the meaning of femininity from the Qur’anic God’s point of view. This study also considers some repeated phenomena in the narrating style of the Qur’anic stories which reveal new features about the Qur’anic narrator.



 



      ![S. Zahra Moballegh](/sites/g/files/omnuum4861/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/hds_wsrp/files/zahra-v2-200x200.jpg?itok=EazxExax) 

 

 

  

 



University of Massachusetts, Amherst

### Z. Fareen Parvez 

 

**Project title: Women, Trauma, and the Islamic Sciences of Healing: A Case Study of Jinn Possession in Morocco**

The project examines the global revival and state suppression of the “Islamic sciences of healing” through a qualitative case study based in Morocco. It explores how women become central to debates about Islamic reform and how possession becomes a site to manage gender relations and trauma.



 



      ![Fareen Parvez](/sites/g/files/omnuum4861/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/hds_wsrp/files/fareen_parvez_0.jpg?itok=6v1n8Y9X) 

 

 

  

 



Purdue University

### Ashley M. Purpura 

 

Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Theology

**Project title: Liberating Orthodoxy: Feminism, Faith, and Divine Otherness**

This monograph argues Orthodox Christianity can be reframed to liberate tradition from its own patriarchal constraints by privileging continuity with incarnation, resurrection, and theosis. Rereading historical theology and present practices through the lens of a uniquely Orthodox feminist theological critique, I show participation in divine otherness necessitates women’s freedom.



 



      ![Ashley Purpura](/sites/g/files/omnuum4861/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/hds_wsrp/files/ashley_purpura_0.jpg?itok=Cw-1WzXq)