RESEARCH AND SCHOLARSHIP
Our faculty are engaged in fascinating research—from studies on water rights in the Mekong riparian region to the historiography of Black Diaspora studies.
FACULTY HIGHLIGHTS
Samer Abboud, PhD, is the author of Syria (Polity, 2018), a book that explores the background and trajectory of the Syrian conflict. In this book, Dr. Abboud explores how networks of violence emerged alongside a non-violent protest movement aimed at overthrowing the Syrian regime. The co-existence and tension between violence and non-violence in Syria shaped both the political and military stalemate that defined the conflict until Russian military intervention in late 2015. Dr. Abboud has explored the aftermath of this intervention in a number of recent journal articles including “Reconciling Fights, Settling Civilians: The Making of Post-Conflict Citzienship in Syria,” in Citizenship Studies (February, 2020) and “Making peace to sustain war: the Astana Process and Syria’s illiberal peace” in Peacebuilding (March 2021).
Nathan Badenoch, PhD, published Expressives in the South Asian Linguistic Area (Brill, 2020), co-edited with Nishaant Choksi, PhD, of the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. This volume is the product of collaboration under an international research network convened to explore the class of words called expressives, or ideophones, across Asia. The chapters examine expressives in different languages from four major families of South Asia (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austroasiatic and Tibeto-Burman), from the perspectives of semantics, morphosyntax and phonotactics, as well as the performative contexts in which they are used, such as literature and film. The book advances a holistic approach to understanding expressives as part shared areal linguistic culture, local language ideologies and practices, and as an intersection of grammar and poetics. His contributions to this volume include “Introduction” (with Nishaant Choksi), “Sticky Semantics: Expressive Meaning in Mundari” and “Expanding the Model of Expressive Reduplication in Mundari” (with Toshiki Osada and Madhu Purti). As a part of the same project, Dr. Badenoch published, together with Toshiki Osada, PhD, A Dictionary of Mundari Expressives (2019), from the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Africa and Asia.
WELCOME NEW FACULTY
Dana Lloyd, PhD, joined Villanova University as assistant professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies in fall 2021. A scholar of law, religion, and indigeneity, she has an article, “Storytelling and the High Country: Reading Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association,” in the forthcoming issue of Journal of Law and Religion, as well as an article “Law, Religion, and Paradoxes of Sovereignty,” which serves as an introduction to a symposium she guest-edited, in the forthcoming issue of Political Theology. She also has two chapters in the forthcoming edited volume Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes (Equinix, 2022): “Is Indigenous Law Religious?” and “What is a Land-Based Religious Tradition?”
Her recent public scholarship includes “Native American Religious Freedom After Trump,” “Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Nonhuman Environment” and “The Coloniality of Wilderness.” She is the curator of a forthcoming symposium on Kathleen Sands’ America’s Religious Wars.
Joseph Lennon, PhD, recently published on the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, and the Indian writer, Rabindranath Tagore—both Nobel Laureates and influential anti-colonial writers in the early twentieth century. His book chapters appear in Yeats and Asia, ed. Sean Golden (Cork UP, 2020) and Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning, eds. Elizabeth Redwine and Amrita Ghosh (forthcoming 2022).
Kayo Shintaku, PhD, had a chapter “Game-mediated activities in JFL classrooms: Considerations and issues in learning, teaching, and implementation,” published in the edited volume, Technology-supported Learning In and Out of the Japanese Language Classroom: Advances in Pedagogy, Teaching and Research (Eds. by E. Zimmerman & A. McMeekin, Multilingual Matters, 2019).
Nathan Badenoch, PhD, published Expressives in the South Asian Linguistic Area (Brill, 2020), co-edited with Nishaant Choksi, PhD, of the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar.
Samer Abboud, PhD, published an article, “Reconciling Fights, Settling Civilians: The Making of Post-Conflict Citzienship in Syria,” in Citizenship Studies (February, 2020) and “Making peace to sustain war: the Astana Process and Syria’s illiberal peace” in Peacebuilding (March 2021).
Our faculty are consistently producing papers, presenting at conferences and earning recognition for their scholarship. View their faculty bios to learn more.