Research
Faculty in classical and religious studies are internationally recognized for research that spans the ancient Mediterranean world, the Middle East, South Asia, and the Americas. Our scholars study the past through the close reading of texts in their original languages, the analysis of material and visual culture, and archaeological fieldwork from Greece to Israel. They also study the living present, exploring how religious traditions shape communities, politics, and everyday life through ethnographic research and engagement with contemporary practitioners.
This range of approaches reflects the department’s distinctive intellectual breadth, which unites the disciplines of classical studies and religious studies in one unit. Our faculty includes philologists, historians, archaeologists, art historians, philosophers, and ethnographers of religion. Their work addresses questions that cross conventional disciplinary boundaries: the formation and transmission of philosophical and religious traditions, the interplay of text and artifact, the ethics of grief and community, the politics of sacred space, and the long and contested afterlives of antiquity. Students at every level take part in this research culture, whether through independent study, collaborative projects, experiential learning abroad, or digital humanities initiatives.
Research Highlights
Anand Taneja: Islamic Poetry and Ethics in Contemporary India
What resources do religious and literary traditions offer in the face of political violence? In The Gabriel of Madness: Islamic Poetry and Ethics in an Age of Hindu Nationalism (University of California Press, 2026), Anand Taneja explores how Indian Muslims—the largest religious minority in the world’s largest democracy—have drawn on the tradition of Urdu poetry to forge ethical selves and imagine a pluralistic society under conditions of discrimination and repression. Based on years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book reveals how centuries-old poetic traditions remain a vital resource for moral and political life today.
James Zainaldin: The Formation of Scientific Culture in the Roman Empire
How did the Romans develop a culture of organized, systematic knowledge? In The Artes and the Emergence of a Scientific Culture in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2025), James Zainaldin traces the origins of scientific thinking in Rome, not as a borrowing from Greece, but as a distinctly Roman intellectual achievement rooted in the tradition of the artes, the systematic disciplines that organized knowledge from agriculture and medicine to rhetoric and law. The book draws on close reading of Latin technical texts to reveal how Roman writers built the conceptual architecture that would shape Western approaches to knowledge for centuries.
Adeana McNicholl: Buddhist Cosmology and the Ethics of Embodiment
How do stories shape cosmologies, and how do cosmologies shape ethics? In Of Ancestors and Ghosts: How Preta Narratives Constructed Buddhist Cosmology and Shaped Buddhist Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2024), Adeana McNicholl traces the development of the Buddhist “hungry ghost” through narrative literature composed in Pali and Sanskrit during the first millennium of Buddhism’s growth in South Asia. The book shows how these vivid stories of the dead did far more than moralize: they constructed an entire cosmological realm and, in the process, articulated Buddhist understandings of karma, embodiment, gender, and the path to awakening.
Joseph Rife: Archaeological Fieldwork: The American Excavations at Kenchreai
Since 2002, Associate Professor Joseph Rife has directed the American Excavations at Kenchreai, the ancient port of Corinth on the Aegean Sea, under the auspices of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. During the Roman Empire, Kenchreai was one of the busiest harbors in southeastern Europe—a place of vibrant pluralism where Greeks, Romans, and eastern immigrants lived together, worshipped deities from across the ancient world, and hosted one of the oldest Christian congregations in Greece. The ongoing excavation has involved over 150 students and researchers from North America and Europe, including dozens of Vanderbilt students, in activities ranging from excavation and survey to artifact analysis, conservation, digital modeling, and study of the paleoenvironment. Students can participate by developing a research project or Immersion experience. Contact Professor Rife for more information.