WSRP Announces 2025–26 Research Associates
Four new research associates and visiting faculty 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 2025–26 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 2025-26 research associates are: Miki Chase, Sarah Mady, Amy Paris Langenberg, Dotno Pount, and S. Zahra Moballegh. Read more about their backgrounds and their research projects at the WSRP below.
Miki Chase
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and South Asian Religions
Project title: The Ambiguity of the Vow: Law, Kinship, and Gender in Pathologizing the Jain Fast Until Death
In contemporary urban India, Jain laywomen comprise the majority of those who undertake sallekhanā or santhāra, the Jain fast until death. This project examines the everyday relational and ethical labor through which the fast is enacted within the domestic sphere, tracing how doctrinal ideals of asceticism are translated into embodied practice and how women’s ascetic agency is rendered both morally precarious and intelligible within kinship configurations and the evolving Indian legal and political landscape.
Amy Paris Langenberg
Visiting Professor of Women’s Studies and Buddhism
Colorado Scholar
Project title: Accomplished Buddhist Women: The Female Monastic Discipline of the Great Assembly
The Sanskrit text of the Mahasanghika-Lokottaravada Bhikshuni-vinaya provides an extensive archive documenting the lives of premodern Buddhist monastic women within women-centered and mostly women-governed institutions. This project will produce the first anthology of translations showing how they navigated the patriarchal pressures that circumscribed their lives.
Sarah Mady
Visiting Lecturer on Women’s Studies and Early Christianity
Project title: Milk Shrines: Ancient and Modern Healing in the Eastern Mediterranean
In small, unassuming spaces often left out of the historical record, women in ancient Lebanon built networks of healing shrines away from a male-dominated society. In this sacred landscape women today continue to seek healing and an abundance of mother’s milk, and also use shrines as memorials to mothers and children who died prematurely.
Dotno Pount
Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Inner Asian Religions
Project title: Shifting Gender Roles at the Cult of Chinggis Khan in Qing Mongolia
Prior to the seventeenth-century, royal wives performed the rituals at the Cult of Chinggis Khan in Mongolia, yet the surviving tradition forbids their presence. Thus the investigation of gender constitutes an important window into the social history of Mongolia. This project traces the declining status of women in Mongolia between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries based on textual sources in Mongolian, Chinese, and Manchu.
S. Zahra Moballegh
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Islam
Project title: Islamic Narrative Theology: Voice, Gender, and Authority in the Qur’an
Offering a narrative approach to Islamic theology and law, this project examines the role of storytelling through a collective narrator in the Qur’an. Analyzing systematic silences and the narrative voice in Qur’anic stories of women, it explores these narratives as dynamic, aesthetic-political events challenging conceptions of the Qur’an’s authorial voice as a unitary male authority.
