Professor Fischbach Wins Mentorship Award

We are so excited to share that Religious Studies' very own Rahel Fischbach won the Charles Center Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentorship Award. The award was presented at the Fall Research Symposium on September 25, where Fischbach was also mentoring a student, Jada Luxene, for their poster presentation.  

Luxene began working on the project "Poetry as Qur'anic Commentary," with Fischbach in Fall 2025 after learning that much of the Qur'an is still understood through pre-modern commentaries exclusively written by free, male Muslims. Luxene realized that many of these commentaries remain uncontested in both religious and academic fields. For the project, they worked with Professor Fischbach to collect poems written by female Muslim poets who use powerful Islamic or Qur’anic metaphors and images in their art for personal, ancestral, or interreligious reasons.