Team

Katharine Gerbner (co-PI) is an associate professor of history and the director of the Religious Studies Program at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Gerbner’s research examines the history of race and religion, Caribbean and Atlantic history, and theories of conversion. Her first book, Christian Slavery: Conversation and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), shows how religion was fundamental to the development of slavery and race in the early modern Atlantic world. Her second book, Archival Irruptions, (Duke University Press, 2025), examines the construction of religion and the criminalization of Obeah in eighteenth-century Jamaica.

Naveeda Khan (co-PI) is professor of anthropology and affiliate faculty in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, as well as the Programs in Islamic Studies, Environmental Science and Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Khan’s research spans riverine lives and national climate policy in Bangladesh, UN-led global climate governance processes, German romanticism, Bengali and Urdu literature and, more recently, student politics. The author and editor of many books, her monographs include Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan (Duke University Press, 2012), River Life and the Upspring of Nature (Duke University Press, 2022), and In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (Fordham University Press, 2023).

Mona Oraby (PI) is an associate professor of political science at Howard University whose research explores religion and society in comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. Dr. Oraby is the author of Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2024), a study of minority claims making against a majoritarian state, and coauthor of A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (Indiana University Press, 2022), a graphic nonfiction book that invites readers to think again and anew about how the visual is integral to thought. For eight years (2017–2025), she curated and edited more than forty public-facing and experimental projects as editor of The Immanent Frame, advancing scholarly debate on secularism, religion, and the public sphere globally

Lisa H. Sideris (co-PI) is professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with affiliation in the Religious Studies Department. Dr. Sideris’s research focuses on the ethical and spiritual significance of nature and natural processes and how “environmental” values may be captured or obscured by perspectives from religion and the sciences. Wonder is a frequent theme in her writing. She is the author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press, 2017). Sideris is also co-editor of an interdisciplinary collection of essays on the life and work of Rachel Carson, titled Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge (SUNY Press, 2008).