WSRP Announces 2026–27 Research Associates
The Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School is pleased to announce the appointment of the 2026-27 research associates and visiting faculty.
Five 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 2026–27 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 2026-27 research associates are: Jennifer Barry, Fungai Chirongoma, MK Long, Anna Elena Torres, Paola Uparela, and S. Zahra Moballegh. Read more about their backgrounds and their research projects at the WSRP below.
Jennifer Barry
Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Early Christianity
Colorado Scholar
Project title: Red Shoes: Marian Iconography, Material Culture, and the Choranic Imagination in Late Antiquity
In mosaics from late antique and Byzantine churches, the Virgin Mary is sometimes depicted wearing vivid red shoes. This project examines how this small detail signals the transformation of an ordinary body into a sacred presence. By following her shoes across different sites, the book shows how material objects and visual choices helped define what it meant to see the Virgin.
Fungai Chirongoma
Visiting Professor of Women’s Studies and African Religions
Project title: Religion as a Resource for Healing for ‘Women of Faith’ Survivors of Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
The project will examine how women of faith in faith-based shelters for abused women utilize religious rituals, and beliefs to recover from trauma and rebuild their sense of identity. The project highlights the centrality of religion in their recovery journeys.
MK Long
Visiting Lecturer on Women’s Studies and South Asian Religions
Project title: Between Buddhas: Scenes of Belonging in Burmese Biography
Buddhist women in Myanmar are typically excluded from the terms and spaces of religious authority. By offering the first English translations of their biographical writings in Burmese, Long shows how Buddhist laywomen and nuns have overcome challenges of recognition by building their own institutional spaces and voicing authority and belonging in their own terms.
Anna Elena Torres
Paola Uparela
Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Christianity
Project title: Souls and Wombs: Women’s Labor, Miraculous Reproduction, and Colonial Biopolitics in the Transatlantic Evangelization Project
This project examines several books and manuscripts by Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas (Seville c.1484 –1566) about women’s working conditions, sexual violence, menstruation and humors, pregnancy nutrition, labor pains and remedies to relieve them, and the risks of procreating at an early age, among other topics regarding Indigenous women’s labor rights.
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.
