Faculty


Shahzad Bashir
Associate Professor and Graduate Director (Yale)

Specializes in Islamic Studies with primary interests in Sufism, Shi'ism, and the intellectual and social history of Persianate Islamic societies (Iran and Central and Southern Asia). He is the author of Messianic Hopes and Mystical Visions: The Nurbakhshiya Between Medieval and Modern Islam and Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis. He has recently finished a book project entitled Bodies of God's Friends: Sufis in Persianate Islamic Societies and is currently working on a comparative study of Persian historical and hagiographic narratives from the late medieval to early modern period.

sbashir@stanford.edu Bld 70, Rm 72F 650-736-8488


Carl W. Bielefeldt
Evans-Wentz Professor and Department Chair (California-Berkeley)

Specializes in East Asian Buddhism, with particular emphasis on the intellectual history of the Zen tradition. He is the author of Dogen's Manuals of Zen Meditation and other works on early Japanese Zen and serves as editor of the Soto Zen Text Project Co-Director of the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies


carl@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 71C 650-723-0469


Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert  
Associate Professor (Graduate Theological Union)  
 
Specializes in Judaism: talmudic literature and culture. Her interests include gender in Jewish culture; the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity; the discourses of orthodoxy versus heresy; the connection between religion and space; and rabbinic conceptions of Judaism with respect to Greco-Roman culture. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender (2000), which won the Salo Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies of that year and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Scholarship. She also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007), together with Martin Jaffee (University of Washington). Currently, she is working on a manuscript entitled Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and the Neighborhood. Prof. Fonrobert is the Co-Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford University.

Website: http://jewishstudies.stanford.edu/people/fonrobert

fonrober@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 71B 650-725-1713


Hester G. Gelber
Professor (Wisconsin)

Specializes in late medieval religious thought. She teaches courses on philosophy of religion as well as medieval Christianity. She has written extensively on medieval Dominicans, including: Exploring the Boundaries of Reason: Three Questions on the Nature of God by Robert Holcot OP and most recently It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford 1300-1350. Her current book project is a study of the development of the medieval religious cosmos as a mythologized system of retributive justice.

hgelber@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 72K 650-723-0472


Robert C. Gregg
Teresa Hihn Moore Professor, Emeritus (Pennsylvania)

Specializes in the history of Christianity to the year 700 and concentrates research and teaching in three areas: (1) early Jewish, Christian and Muslim interpretations of a number of biblical and qur'anic "sacred" stories which the Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible and the Qur'an have in common, (2) interactions between Jews, "pagans," Christians and Muslims in the late antique and early Byzantine periods, and (3) developments internal to the Christian movement in its opening centuries-appropriations of Greek and Roman philosophy, disputes over orthodox and heterodox teachings, formation of the canon of Christian scriptures, emergence of ritual practices. creeds, and church institutions.

rgregg@stanford.edu Encina West 214 650-736-8122


Paul Harrison
George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies and Undergraduate Director (Australian National University)

Specializes in Buddhist literature and history, especially that of the Mahayana, and the study of Buddhist manuscripts in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. Currently working on editions and translations of a number of Mahayana and Mainstream Buddhist sutras, including the Vajracchedika (Diamond Sutra), as well as a general study of issues of authority, textual transmission and innovation in Mahayana Buddhism. He is the author of The Samadhi of Direct Encounter with the Buddhas of the Present, and of numerous journal articles on Buddhist sacred texts and their interpretation. He is also one of the editors of the series Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection. Paul serves as Co-Director of the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford and as the department's
Undergraduate Director.

paulh1@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 72E 650-736-8688


Linda Hess
Senior Lecturer (California-Berkeley)

Specializing in Hinduism, she writes on the poetry of North India's great 15th and 16th-century "poet-saints," their ongoing popularity and influence, and modes of performing their works. Research and teaching interests include poetry of religious experience, gender, performance, and reception of religious texts and practices by people in different social and historical circumstances. Publications include The Bijak of Kabir (translations and essays) and articles on interpretation and performance of the Ramayana.

lionda@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 72D 650-736-8122


Barbara Pitkin
Senior Lecturer (Chicago)

Specializes in the history of Christian thought, with a particular emphasis on the religious developments in late medieval and early modern Europe. She teaches courses on medieval Christianity, sixteenth-century reformations, the history of biblical interpretation, and women and religion. She is the author of a book on John Calvin’s understanding of faith and numerous articles on his interpretation of scripture and children in Calvin’s Geneva. Most recently she has co-edited The Formation of Clerical and Confessional Identities in Early Modern Europe.

pitkin@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 72J1 650-723-2895


Behnam Sadeghi
Assistant Professor

Specializes in the early centuries of Islamic religion and teaches courses on pre-modern intellectual history. He has done research on the early history of the Qur'an, the hadith literature, and the early legal debates about women in the public space. His doctoral dissertation examined methods of textual interpretation applied in the Hanafi school of law in the pre-modern period. He has taught Approaching Religion (covering early Islam), and courses on pre-modern theology, pre-modern law, and the early history of the Qur'an.

behs@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 71A 650-725-2933


Tom Sheehan
Professor (Fordham)

Specializes in contemporary European philosophy and its relation to religious questions, with particular interests in Heidegger and Roman Catholicism. His books include: Martin Heidegger, Logic: The Question of Truth (trans., 2007); Becoming Heidegger (2007); Edmund Husserl: Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Encounter with Heidegger (1997); Karl Rahner: The Philosophical Foundations (1987); The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (1986); and Heidegger, the Man and the Thinker (1981).   

Website: Heidegger At Stanford

tsheehan@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 72G 650-723-3322 or 650-723-0468.


Brent Sockness
Associate Professor (Chicago)

Specializing in modern Western religious thought, his teaching covers a variety of exemplary figures, movements, and topics in the history of European, especially Christian, thought since the 17th century. His research focuses on German Protestant theology and ethics in the 19th century, most currently the ethical theory of the early 19th-century philosopher, theologian, and humanist, Friedrich Schleiermacher. He is author of Against False Apologetics: Wilhelm Herrmann and Ernst Troeltsch in Conflict and numerous articles on Herrmann, Troeltsch, and Schleiermacher. He has held fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the American Academy in Berlin, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is Vice-President of the German Schleiermacher-Gesellschaft. He serves also on the steering committees of Stanford's programs in Ethics in Society and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities.

sockness@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 72B 650-723-4051


Steven P. Weitzman
Professor and Koshland Chair of Jewish History an Culture (Harvard)

Specializes in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the histories of Flavius Josephus. Drawing heavily on comparative evidence from ancient Near Eastern, Greek and Roman culture, he has sought to rethink the relationship between texts and contexts in the Hebrew Bible/early Judaism and to pose new questions about ritual, religious violence, early Jewish literary practice, and the history of biblical interpretation. Weitzman's publications include Song and Story in Biblical Narrative (Indiana University Press, 1997), winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in the Humanities; Surviving Sacrilege: Cultural Persistence in Jewish Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2005); Religion and the Self in Antiquity (edited with David Brakke and Michael Satlow from Indiana University Press, 2005); and The Jews: a History (with John Efron, Matthias Lehmann and Joshua Holo; Prentice Hall, 2009) His current projects include a biography of King Solomon under contract with Yale University Press. He has a passing interest in archaeology, having collaborated on the Tel-Beth Shemesh excavation for several years, but his main passion as a scholar/teacher is two dimensional--reading and how it helps to generate culture.


sweitzma@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Room 71L


Lee H. Yearley
Evans-Wentz Professor (Chicago)

Specializes in comparative religious ethics, virtue theory, selected Christian thinkers, and classical Chinese thought. He is the author of The Ideas of Newman: Christianity and Human Religiosity and Mencius and Aquinas: Theories and Conceptions of Courage, as well numerous journal articles.


yearley@stanford.edu Bldg 70, Rm 72H 650-723-0466
 
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