UGA Religion Faculty Present at International Congress in Kraków, Poland

Image: From left, Dr. Kendall Marchman and Dr. Derrick Lemons.

Faculty from the University of Georgia’s Department of Religion recently presented their research at the XXIII International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) World Congress, held in Kraków, Poland. The IAHR Congress is one of the most significant international gatherings for scholars of religion, bringing together researchers from around the globe to share their work and engage in cross-cultural dialogue.

Welcome lunch for new graduate students

Grad welcome lunch Aug 2025

The Religion Department is happy to receive a large new cohort of MA and PhD students in Fall 2025. The new students gathered for an orientation and welcome lunch in August together with some returning students and faculty. They are engaging with a variety of interesting research topics in the areas of theologically engaged anthropology, the anthropology of Christianity, the history of Hinduism, the study of Buddhist traditions, early Christianity and New Testament studies, and discipline-based educational research in Religion classrooms. Welcome!

Rachel Tagoulla

Lecturer

Rachel Tagoulla holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures from Indiana University Bloomington, where she focused on Islamic Ethics, Sufism, and Arabic Pedagogy. She also earned a B.A. in Arabic Language and a Master’s degree in Religion.

Doctoral candidate Blessing Adewuyi receives a Louisville Institute Dissertation Fellowship

Blessing Adewuyi

Many congratulations to Blessing Temitope Adewuyi, doctoral candidate in Religion, who has been awarded one of the highly competitive Louisville Institute Dissertation Fellowships. Adewuyi is in the final stages of completing her doctoral dissertation in the area of religion and bioethics. Her specific research topic is personhood in Christian theology and African traditions, with a special focus on implications for the ethics of human enhancement technologies. Adewuyi is working with Dr. Carolyn Medine as her major professor. 

Paul Babinski

Assistant Professor

Paul Babinski studies the intersection between the history of Christian-Muslim relations and material religion. His work focuses on scholarly practices and the manuscript transmission of religious and literary texts from Islamic Eurasia into Central and Western Europe from the medieval Arabic-Latin translation movement to the emergence of the modern disciplines of oriental studies in the nineteenth century. 

He is currently writing a book on the history of reading and translating the Qur’an in Europe, based on a survey of annotated manuscripts and printed editions. Recent publications include a contribution for the Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an on the history of non-Muslim Qur’an translation in Europe, a study of the use of looted manuscripts and Muslim captives in European Qur’anic study, an article on the formation of the first German Islamic manuscript collections, a case-study in the seventeenth-century European reception of Qur’anic exegesis, and a reconstruction of the role of Ottoman philology in the development of European Persian studies.

Education:

Ph.D., Princeton University

M.A., University of Colorado - Boulder

B.A., University of Colorado - Boulder

Selected Publications:

“The Orientalist Turn to Tafsīr: Abraham Wheelock’s Qur’an”, Christian Readings of Muslim Exegetical Sources in Interreligious Perspective, ed. Ulisse Cecini. (forthcoming)

(with Jan Loop) “Non-Muslim European Translations of the Qur’an, 1143-1850”, Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an (2025) 

(with Jan Loop) “Looting and Learning: War and the Qur’an in European Oriental Studies”, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 9(3) (2024), 239-280.

“The Qur’an as Turkish Booty (Türkenbeute)”, in The European Qur’an, edited by Jan Loop and Naima Afif. Berlin: De Gruyer, 2024, 55-65. 

“The Manuscript Catalog.” in Taking Stock: Media Inventories in the German Nineteenth Century, edited by Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, and Petra S. McGillen. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024, 217-225. 

“The Formation of German Islamic Manuscript Collections in the Seventeenth Century.” In Sammler—Bibliothekare—Forscher: Zur Geschichte der orientalischen Sammlungen an der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, edited by Sabine Mangold-Will, Christoph Rauch, and Siegfried Schmitt. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2022, 19-44. 

“Ottoman Philology and the Origin of Persian Studies in Western Europe: The Gulistān’s Orientalist Readers.” Lias, Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources 46(2) (2019), 233-315. 

 

Tom Schulman, "Dead Poets Society" screenwriter, visits Dr. J. Derrick Lemons' Class

Image: From left, Tom Schulman, Professor Derrick Lemons and students take a selfie. Photo by Gareth Rose.
By: Mianna Lotshaw

Greeted by a round of applause from a class full of students, "Dead Poets Society" screenwriter and Academy Award winner Tom Schulman visited UGA on April 10. Schulman was interviewed by religion professor and department head Derrick Lemons about his process writing the film and his experiences in the movie industry as a part of Lemons’ Anthropology of American Religion course.

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