Alexander Angelov, David L. Holmes Associate Professor of Reformation Studies and American Religious History

In addition to his research in the Humanities, Professor Angelov is currently leading two separate teams. The first project, which is in collaboration with investigators from the University of Washington, applies a multi-factor analysis of the effects of religion on public health, trauma, and psychotherapeutic recovery. The second team studies big econometric data received from the European Union and looks at the impact of political uncertainty on wages and well-being comparatively and cross-sectionally.   

Prof. Angelov continues to enjoy his regular classes on the History of Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, Eastern Christianity, and Christianity and Radical Politics. He is developing a new course entitled God and Money: Religion and the History of Finance. He is also working closely with students on Noetica (an interdisciplinary forum for undergraduate research). 

Annie Blazer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Professor Blazer is finishing her second book, American Culture through Religion and Sport, while on sabbatical for the 2024-2025 academic year. She presented work from this book at the annual meeting for the American Society of Church History. William & Mary generously provided a faculty research grant and funding from the faculty grant fund to assist the final stages of writing the book manuscript. Blazer looks forward to seeing this book come into the world in winter 2026 from Bloomsbury Press.  

Patton Burchett, Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Professor Burchett was awarded the 2024 Plumeria Award for Faculty Excellence in teaching and research and has been making important progress on three different research projects, conducting multi-week international research for two of these projects.  In Spring-Summer 2024, he traveled to England to conduct three weeks of archival research in London and Cambridge for a second book project, tentatively titled The Authentic Yogi: Yoga and Tantra between Science, Religion, and Magic.  He also traveled to Nepal for five weeks (April-May) of field research for a Provost Interdisciplinary Research Innovation Grant (2023) funded project, “Understanding Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural and Religious Significance of Nature for Integrative, Holistic Water Conservation Strategies in Nepal.” There he conducted ethnographic field work with members of Hindu, Buddhist, and diverse indigenous communities at riverside sites all over Nepal to gain information about their specific ways of understanding and relating to (i.e. their beliefs about and practices involving) fresh water resources in the context of rapid environmental changes occurring as a result of climate change and development projects. Learn more about this work for W&M’s Nepal Water Initiative at their new website: https://nepalwater.pages.wm.edu 

Joined by Religious Studies colleagues Kevin Vose and Mark McLaughlin, this year Prof. Burchett also continued work on another Provost Interdisciplinary Research Innovation Grant (2023) funded project, “Unraveling Contemplative Practices,” which studies the cultural and social forces affecting meditation and mindfulness practices today and differences between secular and religious motivations of contemplation in order to elucidate the most effective means of obtaining psychological, cognitive, and emotional benefits from these practices. 

This past year Prof. Burchett taught his staple courses: “Introduction to Hinduism” (Fall 24), “Religions of the World” (Fall 24), “Religion and Politics in the U.S.” (Summer 24), “Modern Hinduism” (Spring 25), and “Spiritual But Not Religious” (Spring 25). 

Outside of work, Prof. Burchett spends his time cooking, exercising, and chauffeuring his two daughters (3rd and 5th grade) to swim practices and other various activities. This year he teamed with Religious Studies colleague Andrew Tobolowsky and other W&M faculty and staff on in W&M’s intramural basketball league.  Playing against student intramural teams, their squad, “Grumpy Old Men,” secured a 4-1 regular season record and a playoff win before being eliminated in the tournament semifinals. 

Michael Daise, Department Chair and Endowed Professor of Judaic Studies in Religious Studies

In 2024 and this first half of 2025 Prof. Daise continued to chair the department and taught three courses: Rabbis and Fathers (spring 2024), Christian Origins (fall 2024) and The Gospel of John (spring 2025). He remains impressed by the commitment, integrity and quality work of W&M students, and finds himself (as has been the case since he began here) able to convey material that broaches graduate school level in both content and degree of difficulty. In the summer and fall of 2024 he collaborated with (third year senior!) student Chloe Williams on a Kranzberg Faculty-Student Research Project titled ‘Jews, Christians and Romans from Imperial to Late Antique Rome’. Ms. Williams conducted preparatory work for her honors thesis in Rome, visiting catacombs and completing course work with the Council on International Educational Exchange. Prof. Daise developed work on his next monograph, delivering a paper on the Jewish Diaspora and early Christ-believing groups in Rome at the 10th Annual Meeting on Christian Origins, Centro Italiano di Studi Superiori sulle Religioni, Centro Residenziale Universitario di Bertinoro. Prof. Daise also directed (and currently is directing) Ms. Williams and Sunjeong Bailey in two (in his mind brilliant) honors theses—Ms. Williams, on identity claims to be gleaned from Jewish, Christian and pagan burial sites in 3rd-4th century Rome; Ms. Bailey, on contemporary Roman Catholic postures toward the recently deceased (and soon-to-be canonized) Carlo Acutis. The methods and subject matter of these projects could not be further apart—one treating ancient material culture through the lens of Émile Durkheim; the other canvassing local Catholic parishes for views on a soon-to-be teenage saint who applied his tech prowess to tracking claims of the miraculous. They are both entirely intriguing in their own ways, however; and Prof. Daise is happy (and proud) to report that both students have secured enrollment in top Religious Studies graduate programs starting 2025. 

For part of his remit as Judaic Studies Professor, Prof. Daise sponsored two lectures over the past year. In early April 2024 he reinstated the ‘William and Sue Anne Bangel Annual Lectures on Southern Jewish History’ to its proper purpose by inviting Mark K. Bauman, Emeritus Professor of History, Atlanta Metropolitan College’, to speak on ‘The Debate Over Southern Jewish Distinctiveness’. And later that same month he capped off the year with the ‘Milton and Shirley Salasky Memorial Lectures in Judaica’, inviting Piero Capelli, Professor of Hebrew in the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, to lecture on '"A Source of Shame and Horror": Discovering, Translating and Burning the Talmud in Medieval Christian Europe', 

In research Prof. Daise wrote and submitted a book proposal for an anthology of articles written by members of the Catholic Biblical Association’s Task Force on ‘John’s Gospel and the Old Testament’. Provisionally titled, Christ’s Glory in Israel’s Story: Scripture in the Gospel of John, its preliminary review has now been ‘green lit’ for full peer review with the series Catholic Biblical Quarterly Imprints of the Catholic Biblical Association Press. Prof. Daise also delivered a second paper, this one serving the second installment of a trilogy on the martyr Stephen: ‘Christ-Believers in Jerusalem and the Economy of Pilgrimage’, presented to the ‘Early Christianity and the Ancient Economy’ section of the Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Moreover, Prof. Daise began to serve as co-chair of the panel ‘Luke and Acts in their Historical, Anthropological and Literary Context’, for the aforementioned Centro Italiano di Studi Superiori sulle Religioni. And alongside his monograph Prof. Daise is writing two articles on the full ramifications of Judaean desert manuscripts for the quotations of Jewish scripture in the Gospel of John. This endeavor was begun in a monograph written by Edwin Freed in 1965, during the infancy of scholarship on the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls. It has never been completed, however; and with the full publication of those manuscripts in the early 2000s—as well as the availability of tools for searching detailed information within them—Prof. Daise is gleaning and assessing the bearing they have on both the text form (actual wording) and hermeneutics (interpretation) of biblical passages cited formally in the Fourth Gospel. (If he seems distracted, it’s because he’s pondering the prolific use of the Hebrew conjunction waw in the Great Isaiah Scroll and its ramification for the word replacement in the quotation of Isaiah 40:3b in John 1:23.) Also, this last December Prof. Daise was interviewed on the topic of the ‘Historical Jesus’ for the podcast Church Coffee: Christianity, Conservativism and Culture.

In the summer of 2025 Prof. Daise will be delivering three more papers, one slated for publication: the first is ‘Jerusalem Christ-Believers as Returned Immigrants’, at the International Society of Biblical Literature, Uppsala, Sweden; the second (sibling to the above-mentioned article on John and Judaean desert manuscripts) is titled ‘John and Qumran Revisited: The Interpretation of Biblical Quotations’, for the European Association of Biblical Studies, also at Uppsala; the third (also the third of the trilogy on the martyr Stephen) is titled ‘Politics and the First Christian Martyrdom’, for the Oxford Symposium on Religious Studies, Harris Manchester College, Oxford. 

Rahel Fischbach, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Professor Fischbach is teaching a new course this semester called Women and Gender in the Qur'an and recently presented part of her forthcoming book in a talk titled "Trapped in History: Sex, Gender, and creation in the Qur'an." Her article, “Ästhetik der Gewalt im Qur'an,” has recently been published in English by Springer.  Learn more about Professor Fischbach's research and interests here.  

Joanna Homrighausen, Adjunct Lecturer for Judaic Studies and Religious Studies

In her fourth year at William & Mary, Joanna Homrighausen continues to teach the Biblical Hebrew sequence, as well as the pilgrimage course for first-year writing students she designed with the William & Mary Institute for Pilgrimage Studies. Since last fall, she has had two articles on religion and art accepted for publication, including one in the open-access journal Bible in the Arts. In February, she gave a paper on lettering arts and pilgrimage for a symposium put on by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art, which will be published in a volume of papers on art and pilgrimage. Most proximately, she is looking forward to writing about British artist Martin Wenham this summer for a book under contract, as well as teaching New Testament Greek for Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond. 

Maggie Kirsh, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

This past summer, Professor Kirsh’s article, “Witnessing the Recovery: Storytelling and Family Building, from Belsen to Ireland” appeared in International Migration Review. In addition to serving as a judge for the Holocaust Commission’s Elie Wiesel Writing Competition, she was the featured speaker in the Yom HaShoah Remembrance Program hosted by the UJC, where she presented “Of Castles and Kibbutzim: Storytelling and Healing After the Holocaust.”  

Professor Kirsh continues teaching a variety of courses for the Program in Judaic Studies and the Religious Studies Department, including The Holocaust, Gender and Judaism, and Modern European Jewish History. She recently revamped her syllabus for Writing the Self: An Exploration of Jewish History Through Memoirs. In particular, students enjoyed the new additions of Michael Twitty’s Koshersoul and Ayelet Tsabari’s The Art of Leaving. 

When she’s not grading papers, writing, or conducting research, Professor Kirsh can be found mucking out horse stalls in a barn in Toano, trying new recipes with her favorite sous chefs (her kids!), and drinking as much tea as possible. 

Mark McLaughlin, Teaching Professor of South Asian Religions

No update available at this time, but reach out via email or learn more about Professor McLaughlin's research and interests here. 

Randi Rashkover, Director of Judaic Studies and Sophia & Nathan Gumenick Associate Professor of Judaic Studies

No update available at this time, but reach out via email or learn more about Professor Rashkover's research and interests here. 

Faraz Sheikh, Hans Tiefel Associate Professor of Ethics

Professor Sheikh will be reading a paper at the 4th annual Critical Muslim Studies conference in Istanbul, Turkiye at the end of May 2025. He will also give a talk on Muslim ethics in the study of religion at the Lahore University of Management & Sciences (LUMS) Lahore, Pakistan at the beginning of June. His class, Illness and Religion, was granted COLL 200 status this Spring. He served on the search committee (jointly with American Studies) for a new, tenure-track hire in the field of African Diaspora Religions and reviewed applications and conducted job interviews and remained actively involved during campus visits by two short-listed candidates. He continues expanding his research in the field of religious ethics collaboratively and plans for a co-authored volume about the ways in which particular forms of religiously-informed thinking and reasoning has the potential to illuminate contemporary moral problems, such as war between nations and environmental degradation, in novel and productive ways. 

Andrew Tobolowsky, Robert & Sarah Boyd Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Professor Tobolowsky published his third book, Ancient Israel, Judah, and Greece: Laying the Foundation of a Comparative Approach in November of 2024, with Sheffield Phoenix Press. His fourth,  "Israel and Its Heirs in Late Antiquity" is due out in June of this year with Cambridge University Press. Professor Tobolowsky was appointed the Walter G. Mason Associate Professor for a term beginning in the fall of 2025, and was nominated for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend fellowship. He was also elected to Faculty Assembly. At home, he continues to run around after his nearly-four-year-old Judah, and shooting hoops at a nearby park, with greater and lesser success. 

Kevin Vose, Walter G. Mason Associate Professor of Religious Studies

Professor Vose’s long awaited book, Splitting the Middle: A Natural History of Middle Way Reasoning, has finally reached production and will hit the shelves of finer purveyors any day now. It is sure to revolutionize your understanding of Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy. Along with Profs. Burchett and McLaughlin (and professors from Applied Science, Philosophy, and Psychology), Prof. Vose continued work on an interdisciplinary research project designed to understand the relationships between motivations for practicing meditation and the tangible results of those practices. The group designed a survey that was completed by over a thousand students and dozens of community members and now is working on the laboratory portion of the project, in which students and community members meditate while wearing an EEG device. The project is funded by William & Mary’s Provost’s Office for a two-year pilot and aims to secure external funding to pursue the work beyond that period. Prof. Vose spent the month of June at the Austrian Academy of Sciences to work on the editing and translation of 12th century Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts. He returned to Vienna in August to give the keynote address at the world’s first international conference on the Middle Way philosophy. Back on campus, he continues to teach on Buddhism, East Asian Religions, and Buddhism & Science.