2025-2026 Faculty Fellows
Michael Azar
Theology/Religious Studies
“The Table and the Empty Seat: Orthodox Christianity and Jewish-Christian Relations”
Since its initial formation over seventy years ago, Jewish-Christian dialogue has been frequented by a variety of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, primarily from Western Europe and North America, but rarely by Orthodox Christians. This reality, which has left a comparatively empty seat at an otherwise seemingly full dialogue table, is an ongoing problem that religious leaders have occasionally lamented; periodically disparaged; often ignored, but rarely understood and never fully explored. By providing the first English-language examination of both Orthodox Christianity’s relationship with Jewish-Christian dialogue and its own bilateral relations with Judaism (and the fullest such examination in any language), “The Table and the Empty Seat” will cast a new light not only on the empty seat, but also on the table itself. I will demonstrates that, for the sake of a more real and long-lasting Jewish-Christian relationship in which Orthodox Christians are full participants (as opposed to periodic guests), it is not simply the empty seat that must be reconsidered, but the political and theological character with which the table of dialogue itself has been set. Only thus can one forge a way forward for two traditions whose current relationship in the Holy Land is as unparalleled as it is tragically overlooked.
Jessica Nolan
Psychology
“Interpersonal Defense of the Environment: Story Gathering”
In this project, using semi-structured interviews, I will gather stories from people who have engaged in interpersonal defense of the environment (IDOTE). IDOTE refers to one individual’s willingness to sanction another who is harming, has harmed, or intends to harm the natural environment through their individual behavior. To defend the environment means for the observer to respond in a way that communicates disapproval to the transgressor with the intention of preventing or stopping further harm. The purpose of my project is to gather stories from individuals who have chosen to confront an environmental transgressor in the course of their everyday lives, so that they can be analyzed to understand how, when, and why individuals choose to confront environmental transgressors in the real world.
Patrick Orr
Psychology
“Foundational Insights from the University of Michigan Pharmacology of Schizophrenia Study”
My research project focuses on understanding how knowledge in neuroscience is produced and used. In particular, I aim to understand the philosophical and political commitments of contemporary neuroscience, with special attention paid to understanding the major figures responsible for shaping the field. These individuals, working in the decades leading up to the advent of institutionalized neuroscience, negotiated the formation of a field with philosophical and political commitments that, after the birth of institutionalized neuroscience, remain largely buried. By uncovering the views of these founders, I hope to unearth and expose the (typically) unarticulated worldview that shapes neuroscience. I hypothesize that brain-based language and understandings of the world are deployed to dull the complexity of situations and to justify otherwise objectionable actions.
Stephen Whittaker
English & Theatre
“From Plato’s Timaeus to the XPI page of the Book of Kells: Narrative”
My research project focuses on a book-length manuscript titled "The Joyce Problem: Timaeus, Euclid, Kells and the Emblem of Creation." In this text, I examine the way, in James Joyce’s imagination, an image of creation evoked in Plato’s "Timaeus" was codified in Euclid’s "Elements of Geometry", and transmogrified in the XPI (chi rho iota) page of the "Book of Kells" into an ikon of Mary as Θεοτόκος (Mother of God), in a profound linking of Classical cosmology and Christian iconography. "The Joyce Problem" will lay out the conceptual origins of the image in Plato and Euclid, a primer on Joyce’s understanding of Plato, and then will examine the dozens of appearances of the idea (as image, as narrative structure, as thematic element) in his short story collection. Towards completing this book, my Slattery project will aim to synthesize diverse new scholarship that appears to confirm Joyce’s reading of the XPI page more than a century after he recognized the classical provenance of its imagery and made that page the defining emblem of his work.