Announcing the 2023 Haas Student Research Grant Recipients
BERKELEY, CA – August 18, 2023 – The Graduate Theological Union is pleased to announce that the 2023-2024 Haas Student Reasearch Grant recipients have been selected. The Haas Student Research Grants are grants for GTU students working on interreligious projects related to Judaism and/or Islam. The grants range from $250 to $500 for individual projects and $500 to $1000 for joint projects.
This year's recipients are as follows:
- Amy Shoemaker - The Tales We Tell: What Islamic and Jewish Stories Reveal about Our Religions and Ourselves
- Jibreel Delgado - Anxieties of Authenticity, Resurgence/Re-Existence, Border Thinking, and Muslim-Jewish Conditions of Modernity
- Katy Dickinson - The Same and Different: Supporting Muslim and Jewish Inmates
- Zeinab Vessal - The Symbolism of Khamsa in Shi’i Tradition
- Morey Lipsett - Khamsa and Hamsa: An Inter-Religious Object in Islamic and Jewish Societies
- Carey Averbook - Menstruation in Judaism and Islam: Feminist and Queer Approaches
Read more about the recipients and their project abstracts here.
The GTU would like to thank the Walter & Elise Haas Fund for their generous support of this program, which has made these research projects possible as part of a multi-faceted $75,000 grant to the GTU in support of the Madrasa-Midrasha Program, a collaborative interreligious effort of the Center for Islamic Studies and the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies.
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About the Walter & Elise Haas Fund
In 1952, Walter A. Haas, Sr. and Elise Stern Haas established the Walter & Elise Haas Fund. Doing so made tangible their commitment to opportunity and access for all. As of its creation the Fund was — and still remains — a natural and enduring extension of our founders’ appreciation for San Francisco and the Bay Area.
The mission of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund is to help build a healthy, just, and vibrant society in which people feel connected to and responsible for their community.
About the Madrasa-Midrasha Program
Founded in 2008, the Madrasa-Midrasha Program explores the richness, diversity, differences, and commonalities of the Jewish and Islamic traditions. A collaborative effort between the GTU's Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish Studies and its Center for Islamic Studies, the program seeks to advance study, dialogue, and understanding on Jewish and Islamic texts and contexts within academia and the larger public. In addition to offering cross-cultural academic courses to GTU students, the program offers workshops, lectures, and panel discussions to the public at large in the greater San Francisco Bay area.
About the GTU
The GTU is the most comprehensive center for the graduate study of religion in North America. With a focus on interreligious and interdisciplinary perspectives, GTU faculty and students engage the world’s great religions and wisdom traditions in contemporary contexts. The GTU educates innovative leaders for the academy, religious organizations, and the nonprofit sector, equipping scholars to embody the critical thinking, ethical frameworks, compassionate values, and spiritual foundations essential to building a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world.
More than a school of theology, the GTU is a union of schools and programs that, together, represent the world’s major religions in collaboration. More than a graduate school, the GTU is an enterprise that cultivates the highest scholarly standards and provides opportunities to translate scholarship into solutions with impact. The GTU provides a unique community where scholars and practitioners from across the world's great religions gather for academic study of their own and of other traditions and disciplines.