WSRP Announces 2024–25 Research Associates
Five new Research Associates will join returning scholar S. Zahra Moballegh at the HDS Women’s Studies in Religion Program and will work on book-length projects during the 2024–25 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.
The 2024-25 Research Associates are: Erminia Ardissino, Ghazal Asif Farrukhi, Ashley L. Bacchi, Aysha Hidayatullah, Wendy Mallette, and S. Zahra Moballegh. Read more about their backgrounds and their research projects at the WSRP below.
Erminia Ardissino
Visiting Associate Professor Emerita of Women’s Studies and Literature
Project title: The Bible for Gender Inclusiveness: Defense of Women’s Dignity and Social Participation in Early Modern Italy
With the spread of books and literacy, as well as new translations from the Latin Vulgate, early modern women found support for their active participation in society in the authority of the Bible. This study examines works of Biblical exegesis produced by Italian women who found in the sacred text a pathway to literary production and a roadmap to moral agency.
Ghazal Asif Farrukhi
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Anthropology
Project title: Hindu Intimacies and the Muslim State in Pakistan
This project explores the desires, domestic lives, and intimate relationships of Hindu women in Muslim majority Pakistan. It examines how the state works to transform religious others into minority citizens by policing women’s sexuality and their maintenance of kinship relations, as well as how Hindu women navigate ritual, devotional, and social boundaries in such an environment.
Ashley L. Bacchi
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Jewish History
Project title: The Sibyl: A Forgotten Female Voice of Prophetic Justice
Ancient and modern debates on gender roles and models of female authority engage manifestations of the Mediterranean prophetess, the Sibyl. Bacchi will investigate the Archaic Greek and Roman Libri Sibyllini traditions, the Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha, and survey the visual reception history of Sibyls in later Christian and secular art to explore the power of female representation in spaces of political and religious authority, and how prophetic voices speak to institutionalized power.
Aysha Hidayatullah
Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Islam
Colorado Scholar
Project title: This Body Called Muslim
This book project examines how the study of gendered embodiment in Islam’s core ritual practices deepens understandings of the meanings of these practices and definitions of Islam.
Wendy Mallette
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Theology
Project title: Lesbian Feminist Killjoys: Sin, Pessimism, and Queer Histories
This project on the nexus of sin, sex, and race draws the archives of lesbian feminist public cultures of the 1960s-1980s into conversation with the doctrine of sin in order to unsettle familiar histories and challenge us to grapple with the noninnocence, and perhaps even depravity, of our desires.
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.
