When she steps across the graduation stage, she’ll earn a degree in Political Science with minors in Economics, Pre-Law Studies and Religious Studies, all completed in four years. “I’m just curious about everything,” she says. “I never wanted to limit myself. You need to do the things that make you afraid, because familiarity is not gonna take you anywhere.”

From Ģ����Ƶ classroom to UN climate summit

UN and research opportunities began with one class and one professor who saw her potential. Religion Professor Julia Berger linked Barahona to the UN offices of the Baha’i International Community (BIC), a nongovernmental organization Berger herself once served.

In her internship in fall 2025, Barahona supported policy research on climate and sustainability and helped inform discussions at COP 30, the global climate conference in Belém, Brazil. The work was “a life-changing experience that I would have never gotten if I hadn’t had made that critical connection at Ģ����Ƶ,” she says. “It opened my eyes to how global policy decisions actually happen.”

Twice a week, she left campus before sunrise to make it possible. “I had to wake up at 5 in the morning so I could catch my train,” she says. Once she arrived at her New York City office, she researched connections between big‑picture climate science and questions of ethics, faith and political will – and how they can bring people together.

Connecting UN experience to Project AROS

Back on campus, Barahona continued to explore climate and justice through Ģ����Ƶ’s Project AROS Lab, investigating youth activism, memory politics and performative justice. The project looks at youth‑led movements like the Sunrise Movement and Fridays for Future, asking “how are they using digital tools to expand their message?”

Her academic path has evolved just as organically. “I had no plans to get three minors,” she says. Coursework led her to Religious Studies; family nudged her toward Law; and a frank conversation about the job market pushed her toward Business and Economics.

“There’s a huge intersectionality, especially with what you see in the news right now, between economics and politics, and that’s when I knew, this is exactly what I want to do,” she says.

Building community on campus

When Barahona arrived at Ģ����Ƶ, she didn’t yet realize how following a friend would change her life. Born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and raised in Highland Park, New Jersey, she wasn’t sure of her next steps. “At the time, I was going through such a hard period that I didn’t even know if college was possible for me,” she recalls. “My best friend convinced me to apply and that honestly changed everything.”

Becoming a resident assistant in Dinallo Heights gave her a home base and helped cover her housing as she sought out campus resources to stay on track. Most importantly, she learned to ask for help when she needed it. Her mother’s advice anchored that mindset: “You need to run towards the things that embarrass you. You need to do the things that make you afraid, because familiarity is not going to take you anywhere.”

What comes next

After graduation, Barahona will head to Rowan University as a graduate assistant in Residence Life while pursuing her MBA. “This is going to sound ambitious, but I do see myself going to law school and then getting a PhD sometime down the road. I love research, so I would love to continue to do that.”

Her professors say they can already see that future taking shape. “I think that very often we assume we know what the students need to know, but might be less attentive to their worlds, their concerns and questions arising from their cultural and generational contexts,” Berger says. “Ana bridged that gap; she brought the lessons to life and helped students to see the significance and implications of the material. And she also has a gift for finding engaging social media content to get across complex points.”

Barahona is realistic about what lies ahead. “There are always barriers. But you can never let a barrier, whether it’s financial, family situations, or whatever the case is, stop you. If you know this is what you want and you know this is the path you’re going, you will remove any barrier possible.”

This story is part of a series celebrating Ģ����Ƶ’s graduates – students who embody the University’s mission to broaden access to exceptional learning opportunities and contribute to the common good.

The trip brought four students in the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) program to the Stockbridge-Munsee Community Band of the Mohican Nation, where they served as volunteers and assistants for a Munsee and Mohican Language and Culture Camp. Led by professors and , the experience gave students the opportunity to engage directly with a living language community. This experience deepened a three-year collaboration with Nikole Pecore, a language keeper whose ancestral languages are rooted in the homelands of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, and who has been a core collaborator with NAIS since its inception.

The trip was part of a broader effort to expand Ģ����Ƶ’s NAIS program and further the development of the New Jersey Center for Indigenous Justice through a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.  It also reflects the program’s commitment to immersive, community-engaged learning that connects academic study with real-world experience.

“Our Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) program is not interested in hollow gestures or performative statements,” says Clatterbuck.  “Rather, we’re committed to the work of Indigenous justice that’s grounded in relationship building and reciprocity with tribal communities.”

Throughout the trip, students were welcomed into intergenerational community spaces where learning unfolded through shared meals, conversations and participation in daily cultural practices.  The group camped on powwow grounds while supporting the language camp, helping to serve traditional meals and participating in activities ranging from block printmaking and dreamcatcher-making to Lenape football and lacrosse.  Evenings were spent around the campfire sharing stories, while mornings began with a sunrise water ceremony.

At the language camp, rather than encountering language as something abstract, students experienced it as part of a living system, connected to the medicinal plants growing on site, and woven into song, storytelling, and family connections.

“Language isn’t something you study on its own,” Taha explains.  “It’s connected to ceremony, to history, to social interaction—it lives within the community.”

Learning in an intergenerational environment, surrounded by elders, families, and young people, highlighted how language is sustained through relationships and shared experience.  The Stockbridge-Munsee Community is a two-language community, preserving both Munsee and Mohican languages with deep historical and cultural ties, including connections to Indigenous communities in New Jersey.

Ellie Paschalis ‘25, who will build on her NAIS minor and community-engaged experiences during graduate studies at U Mass Boston in the fall, found the trip inspiring. “It’s really a beautiful thing to see people reclaim their heritage, and to see that the language persists, and people are actively learning it,” she says. “It’s a direct act of resistance, and a huge step towards rebuilding a piece of culture that was diminished due to colonial pressures.”

Beyond the camp, students expanded their understanding of Indigenous history and life through visits to neighboring nations, including museums and historic preservation spaces on the Menominee Nation and Oneida Nation reservations, and hiking along the Wolf River.

Taha emphasizes the importance of carrying these experiences back to campus.  “This work shows up in our teaching, in our programming, and in how we think about community,” she says, noting the value of centering identity, heritage, and lived experience in the learning process.

Paschalis noted that the camp was different from any other language learning method that she had encountered before. “The strategy behind the method was one of kindness, with teachers and fellow students providing a space for students to learn without shame for making mistakes,” she says. “Teachers applauded each student for their efforts regardless of the answer, reassuring them that they would progress with time and consistency.”

The trip also builds on coursework developed at Ģ����Ƶ, like the course, which has been offered since 2022.  Experiences like this extend that learning beyond the classroom, reinforcing the program’s focus on language, culture, and community as interconnected systems.

Plans are already underway for the next iteration of the trip, with a return visit to Wisconsin anticipated in Summer 2026.  For students considering the experience, this program offers an opportunity to engage deeply with communities, challenge assumptions, and expand their understanding of Indigenous knowledge and justice.

“This is about learning through relationships,” Clatterbuck adds, underscoring the program’s foundation in listening, respect, and reciprocity.

Registration for the summer 2026 trip will open soon, with opportunities for students across disciplines to participate. Additional details, including program dates and application information, will be shared in the coming weeks. In the meantime, interested students are encouraged to contact Maisa Taha (taham@montclair.edu) or Mark Clatterbuck (clatterbuckm@montclair.edu) for more information.

Photo Gallery

With its commitment to Indigenous rights, racial justice, decolonization and eco-justice, the NAIS program emphasizes the priorities of New Jersey’s state-recognized Native American tribes – the Ramapough Lunaape, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape and Powhatan Renape nations – which include environmental justice, political recognition, cultural heritage and language revitalization.

The NJCIJ will be a center for communication, fundraising, events and gatherings that highlight the unique questions facing Ģ����Ƶ’s Indigenous students and New Jersey’s tribal communities. It will coordinate the University’s work to change public narratives, increase Indigenous student enrollment and pursue justice-oriented action on issues affecting Native people in the state.

“The NJCIJ will give focus to the varied work Ģ����Ƶ faculty and students are doing in partnership with New Jersey’s tribal communities,” says Anthropology Department Chair Chris Matthews, a co-director of NAIS and co-Principal Investigator of the grant. “[It] will be the first and only university-based project in New Jersey that aims to transform public understanding of Native people and to do so in partnership with Indigenous communities across the state.”

About the New Jersey Center for Indigenous Justice and NAIS Program Grant

In addition to Matthews, the co-Principal Investigators of the grant include Religion Professor Mark Clatterbuck, Anthropology Professor Maisa Taha and Educational Foundations Professor Lisa Lynn Brooks, all fellow co-directors of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program.

The grant funds will be used to establish the New Jersey Center for Indigenous Justice and achieve the following goals:

• Deepen the impact of the NAIS program by providing additional resources and support for interdisciplinary collaboration and research.
• Establish a digital repository of tribal knowledge and resources to ensure their preservation and availability to tribal members, and to Ģ����Ƶ faculty and students.
• Hire a NJCIJ director who will promote increased engagement with the New Jersey tribes and with Indigenous issues, while also helping to recruit and mentor a growing number of New Jersey tribal members at the University.

Native American and Indigenous Initiatives at Ģ����Ƶ

Ģ����Ƶ is committed to increasing the awareness and knowledge of New Jersey’s Native American tribes and the issues they face.

As demonstrated by the adoption of a Land Acknowledgement Statement in 2022 that recognizes that the University occupies territory historically known as Lenapehoking, the homeland of all Lenape people, the University is committed to social justice and to offering learning opportunities and promoting Native American culture and history.

In addition to the Native American and Indigenous Studies minor, some of these initiatives include:

• Celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day
• Annual NAIS Summer Field School
• Lectures and Panels

“The Mellon Foundation grant will significantly increase Ģ����Ƶ’s ability to fulfill our commitment to addressing the historical legacies of Indigenous dispossession and dismantling practices of erasure that persist today, as stated in our University Land Acknowledgement,” says Clatterbuck. “The new center, in tandem with our Native American and Indigenous Studies program, is focused on Indigenizing New Jersey while decolonizing educational, social and political legacies that continue to overlook Native people and exploit Native lands.”

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at .

Listen to the episode .

The four week program had a full roster of thirteen students along with one postdoctoral fellow and three TAs who were returning past participants, now helping run the trip.

According to Dr. Clatterbuck, professor and co-director of the program, students have a lot of unlearning to do before they can learn Indigenous history. Students discussed the failures of the school systems in not teaching them about Native history or the fact that tribes still exist and live all over New Jersey. In order to begin deconstructing these misconceptions, The Native American and Indigenous Studies program prioritizes getting students in direct contact with Indigenous elders and tribes.

The best way for Native history to be taught is “on their land, in their voices,” says Dr. Clatterbuck.

Week one was spent with the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lunaape Tribe in Ringwood. Under the guidance of Ramapough elder Wayne Mann, students learned about Ford Motor Company’s dumping of toxic waste onto the land in the 1960s and 1970s. Having never been given a proper clean up, the land has since been declared a federal superfund site.

The Turtle Clan taught students about their efforts to demand resources and support for a clean up project and students were able to help them create a digital repository documenting Ford’s contamination of Ringwood.

Week two was spent in Bridgeton with the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribe on the Nanticoke tribal lands and camping out at Cohanzick Sanctuary. Students were able to see how the Cohanzick Sanctuary spreads Indigenous wisdom on how people can reconnect with nature.

Member of the Stockbridge Band of Mohegans from Wisconsin, Wanonah Spencer, and Ramapough youth organization, The Tomorrow People, led talking circles and provided guidance on insightful discussions on how to quiet one’s “human.” The Tomorrow People, formed by Wayne Mann, focuses on developing solutions for problems and trauma derived from the contamination of Ringwood.

The tribe emphasized that environmental justice is necessary now more than ever as we face a new peak in the climate crisis. They reminded students that their ancestors handled the planet with great care and if they want to pass along a healthy world to the next generation, land must be restored and taken care of.

As students were shown how to develop their personal relationships with the environment, the tribe encouraged them to do the same with one another, showing how both relationships go hand-in-hand.

For senior Nawal Rai, a Geography, Environmental, and Urban Studies major, camping at Cohanzick Sanctuary was unpredictably illuminating.

“It was honestly very healing for me,” he says. “We went on a walk at midnight through the woods and stargazed…The elders helped us connect with the site and showed us how to open up with one another, and it brought me closer to so many people.”

This level of engagement is exactly how Rai prefers to learn: “We’re not just learning about the history of Indigenous people from an instructor in a classroom. It’s beyond that. Everything we learned came from people who have experienced the violence of our state, and the stories about their own bloodline finally came from them instead of a textbook.”

The third week was spent with Chief Dwaine Perry, Principal Chief of the Ramapough Mountain Indians, Vincent Morgan, Executive Director of Ramapough Mountain Indians, and Owl, attorney for the Ramapough, bringing the students to a historic Ramapough burial ground. What was once a place built to honor their deceased loved ones has since become another dumping ground for the public.

Students learned about the tribe’s preservation efforts whilst working with Ramapough elders and caretakers of the grounds to clean up the property and study county and state maps. They used the information they gathered and GIS mapping to mark graves and outline the borders of the area to more thoroughly document its existence.

Students utilizing GIS mapping

The fourth and final week of the program brought students to work at Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newton. The 14-acre organic farm is run by Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann, Michaeline Picaro Mann, and the farm’s manager, Lenny Welch (Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians), as a direct response to the contamination of the Ringwood Community.

The farm uses traditional Indigenous practices while harvesting crops and students were shown these customs while weeding, mulching, harvesting, and learning about Indigenous cultivation and the importance of food sovereignty.

Students washing fresh picked strawberries at Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm.

Beyond providing safe food for tribes that cannot harvest on their own lands, the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm has also been a home for the revitalization of the Munsee language. Students learned about how language can be recovered and also decorated signs to be placed all over the property with crops labeled in Munsee with their English translations.

“I think one of the biggest parts of the unlearning process for me was that there still are communities around working to revitalize their language and culture, and I needed to understand that movement, why it is important to them, and why it is important for the world to preserve language and culture,” Nawal Rai says.

Students painting signage in Munsee

The Field School’s program ended with a heart-warming celebration when the students were invited to participate in the annual Nanticoke Powwow at the Salem County Fairgrounds. Each year, the Nanticoke Powwow hosts two days of cultural celebration filled with traditional music, dance, food, and craftsmanship, and students had the unique opportunity to help those running the festivities.

While the history of New Jersey’s treatment of Indigenous tribes tells a painful story of the intended erasure of Native people, the Field School’s summer program highlights their resilience and survival.

Many of us often succumb to the fallacy that Indigenous tribes live far away, either in distance or in time, but the Native American and Indigenous Studies program dismantles the mentality that refers to Native people in the past tense, and the interpersonal relationships and experiences that students gained during the 2024 summer season is only one way they do it.

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The field school will include a blend of traditional classroom learning, fieldwork, hands-on learning, and working as part of a research team.

Specific activities include:

• working with tribal members to create a digital document archive related to the Ringwood Superfund site located in the Ramapough Turtle Clan homeland
• identifying and recording features of Native cultural heritage which may include a cemetery clean up as well as documentation of the Lenape ceremonial stone landscape
• creating resources to support tribal language learning and revitalization
• working at the tribally operated Munsee Three Sisters farm to support of Ramapough food sovereignty

The field school will meet Tuesday-Friday 4 days/week for 4 weeks 8:30am – 4:30pm. Students are expected to commit to the project full time. We will meet on the MSU campus as well as other locations including the Munsee Three Sisters Farm in Newton, NJ and the Ringwood Public Library. Transportation and meals will be provided when we visit off-campus sites. Students accepted to the field school will receive a stipend to offset personal expenses.

Please complete the following form to apply:

Application deadline: Friday, March 8, 2024, 5:00pm
Questions? Contact the programs directors at nais@montclair.edu

Download the 2024 NAIS Field Summer School Flyer

interviewed , Professor of Religion and co-director of Native American and Indigenous Studies, to delve into the controversy and offer insights into the challenges surrounding understanding and respecting Indigenous practices.

“It’s definitely a great place to start, but hopefully it’s not where we stop,” says Farrah Fornarotto, a junior majoring in Anthropology, with minors in Archaeology and the new Native American and Indigenous Studies. “There’s a lot to tackle.”

The challenges date back decades. Munsee Three Sisters Farm provides traditional food for the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lunaape (Lenape) Nation, a tribe that can no longer safely farm its own land in Upper Ringwood, New Jersey. Environmental and health issues caused by industrial dumping have led to a generational decline in the Turtle Clan members’ ability to practice their culture, including the Munsee language, which is at risk of becoming as dormant as the winter fields.

An intensive, field-based partnership with the Turtle Clan Ramapough includes work at the Munsee Three Sisters Farm, where Ģ����Ƶ students and professors are helping the tribe’s Indigenous food sovereignty and language revitalization efforts.

A key aspect of Ģ����Ƶ’s contributions are organizing the tribe’s records and documents related to the industrial dumping on ancestral land. Students are at work to help gather the scientific evidence documented at the Superfund site, the health impact and oral histories from eyewitnesses, and with University resources, creating a single, digitally accessible repository for future researchers and the tribal members who continue to fight for proper cleanup of the land.

More than 300 pages of newspaper articles detailing the dumping of toxic paint sludge from a Ford Motor Co. factory have been indexed by students. “My students are going through and creating a table of contents identifying the names [of key players], the toxic chemicals listed in reports, physical sites that are listed, agencies that are listed, and creating a searchable tool for that whole collection of news articles,” says Mark Clatterbuck, associate professor of Religion and co-director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program.

Ģ����Ƶ students taking part in the class projects say they share a commitment for helping Indigenous communities. Jala Best, a senior Psychology major, says her drive comes from her experiences as an Afro-Indigenous woman.

“Oftentimes the issues of Native communities are ignored or Native people are spoken about in the past tense, like we are not still living, breathing, surviving and fighting for justice …. You can’t even conceptualize that there are atrocities happening today because you believe that it’s a thing of the past,” Best says.

Mark Clatterbuck, right, oversees the garden signage with students Camille Howard, Julia Rodano and Farrah Fornarotto. “It’s the small things that build up, and eventually over time, the Turtle Clan’s language will be more visible to them and also to the public,” Fornarotto says.

Ģ����Ƶ has initiated a field-based partnership with Turtle Clan Chief Vincent Mann of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation. The University support includes students working directly with the tribe on food sovereignty, the language revitalization effort and ongoing environmental concerns as part of Ģ����Ƶ’s new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies.

“The issues and the challenges of the Turtle Clan, they’re huge, they’re varied and there’s no shortage of them,” says Clatterbuck.

The program is closely tied to the University’s Land Acknowledgement Statement. Clatterbuck, along with History Professor Elspeth Martini and Anthropology Professor Chris Matthews consulted with New Jersey’s three state-recognized tribal nations – the Ramapough Lenape, Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape and Powhatan Renape – in drafting the statement, and also considered how it could represent a commitment from Ģ����Ƶ to working with and for their communities.

“It’s not just about making some sort of historical reference. It’s really about saying, ‘What is our responsibility to those communities?’” Clatterbuck says.

Mark Clatterbuck, associate professor of Religion and co-director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program, constructs signage as part of the field work helping promote the preservation of Native American land and culture.

The program is intentionally community-engaged, hands-on and focused on problem-solving, including finding creative ways to support community-driven language revitalization and environmental recovery. “The Ramapough understand that part of their healing and survival is really dependent on recovering key aspects of their cultural ways,” Clatterbuck says. “Language is on par with restoring foodways and their access to clean water, land and air.”

Munsee language expert, Nikole Pecore, a member of the Stockbridge-Munsee Nation in Wisconsin, has guided Ģ����Ƶ students studying Linguistic Anthropology in building a digital repository of instructional materials that will be used to train new Munsee teachers and support community learners.

“We’re looking at language as a key to culture, to bringing back Munsee speaking cultures, as well as other Lenape languages belonging to original peoples in the state of New Jersey,” says Associate Anthropology Professor Maisa Taha.

Work on the farm also includes students preparing the fields and helping deliver the organic, healthy, medicinal healing crops to the community. “It’s doing the nitty-gritty work with local communities and following their lead,” Clatterbuck says.

Meryem Teke, a senior Religion major, paints a garden sign at the Munsee Three Sisters Farm. The work is among the creative ways Ģ����Ƶ is supporting the Turtle Clan’s language revitalization and environmental recovery.

“It might be challenging to figure out how all of these different pieces fit together. But the fact of the matter is they are all intimately connected,” Taha says. “You can’t have language without culture. You can’t have culture without tribal sovereignty. You can’t have tribal sovereignty without environmental justice. What we’re bringing to our students and frankly, to ourselves as well, is this huge opportunity to work with our tribal partners in trying to understand those connections and come up with reasonable, impactful solutions that will serve them for years to come.”

Clatterbuck adds, “We’re all passionate about this on a personal level, and we see this as a matter of justice and addressing – you hear the buzzword ‘decolonization’ thrown around a lot – but as far as I’m concerned, this is what that work looks like. It’s messy, and it’s trial and error, and we’re figuring all this out as we go. But that is the work.”

Photo Gallery

Ģ����Ƶ’s new minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies is focusing on issues of indigenous sovereignty, cultural revitalization, environmental justice and language reclamation. Some of the field work is happening at the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newtown, New Jersey.

Ģ����Ƶ students have created signage for the Three Sisters Farm in the Munsee language. The illustrations will help tribal members as well as visitors to the farm visually connect the pictures and actual plants with the Munsee word. Efforts are also underway to create audio files so that learners can hear those words when accessed by QR codes added to the signs.

A rooster at Munsee Three Sisters Farm.

Story by Staff Writer Marilyn Joyce Lehren. Photos by John J. LaRosa.

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Please join us! Documentary screening followed by panel discussion with filmmaker and tribal leaders!

Film Description: In September 2020 the documentary crew filmed a talking circle of Ramapough elders, relations, and partners at the Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm. The resulting documentary- The Meaning of the Seed – is structured along the layers of the landscape, chronologically working up from the ground to the overstory. The first section, SOIL, describes the history of contamination in Ringwood and the contaminated ground that many Native Americans live on or near. SEED recounts the struggles of the Ramapough and their cultural connections to the land. GROWTH chronicles the Ramapough’s cultural restoration program and efforts to work towards food sovereignty through their recently inaugurated Munsee Three Sisters Medicinal Farm in Newton, NJ. Finally, SUNLIGHT is a call to action, as the talking circle participants urge a younger generation to become involved with environmental justice movements.

The ancestral home of the Ramapough Lunaape (Lenape) Turtle Clan is Ringwood, New Jersey. The landscape includes former iron mines, Native American rock shelters, a forest in which people hunt and forage for food, a large drinking water reservoir, deep pockets of contaminated soil, streams that now flow with orange water, a stew of different chemical toxicants from the former Ford manufacturing plant, and the Ringwood Mines/Landfill Superfund Site. People live in the Superfund site, just upstream from the Wanaque Reservoir, which provides drinking water to millions of New Jersey residents.

Co-sponsored by:
• Departments of Anthropology, History, Linguistics, and Religion
• The Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education Project
• The University Senate Land Acknowledgment Committee.

For further information please contact: Chris Matthews at matthewsc@montclair.edu

Tell us about your current research.

Right now I’m working on using immersive technologies to create interactive virtual reality experiences of religious rituals. Sponsored by a National Endowment of the Humanities grant, I hosted a workshop last year that brought together immersive media creators, digital humanists, and scholars from several disciplines to lay the groundwork for how to use 360-degree filming and 3D sound technology to capture live rituals. Incorporating interviews with scholars, religious professionals, and practitioners alongside informational overlays and 3D renderings of ritual implements, the project promises to bring users into spaces while providing reliable information about the procedure, symbolism, and meanings.

Recently I launched a partnership with the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago, and together we intend to create a set of resources over the next 2 years. In addition, I’m working with Ģ����Ƶ State faculty colleagues in the School of Communication and Media to outline pilot experiential learning classes where students would take the lead in the research, planning, and recording of these experiences, including developing skills in highly prized digital media skills.

Talk about the importance of your work from your perspective as a humanities scholar or social scientist – Why does it matter for society? What makes it valuable to our students?

Religion is an issue of perpetual interest, but too often students don’t know what we do in the study of religion. Allowing students to witness ‘first-hand’ the religious practices of others can help radically increase intercultural understanding and empathy. Recording rituals would require partnering with local religious communities and collaboratively determining how to represent their practices in a balance between insider knowledge and outsider analysis. Using VR in humanities classrooms has been shown to increase retention, advance learning outcomes, and engage students in deep and long-lasting ways. Virtually entering into the religious spaces that are unfamiliar–as well as getting perspectives on spaces that are familiar–can advance our appreciation of diversity and demystify practices students have never encountered. If all of this can be delivered in classes where students take the lead in production from start to finish, it can be an educational opportunity with an impact that extends far beyond the university.

What makes your approach to teaching and research unique or innovative?

First, by integrating new media into teaching about religion we can harness new technologies towards activating students’ interest and imagination. By integrating interactivity into these resources, students are given agency over learning experiences that transport them to the spaces wherein religious life takes place. Second, the ability to approximate presence at sacred spaces without leaving the campus can capitalize on the benefits from popular “site visit” activities with much greater flexibility and fewer resources. Lastly, guiding students through the creation stages of VR experiences will not only give them skills highly attractive for numerous careers, but also show them what is possible in this new world of immersive media.

Do you have a favorite course to teach?

I routinely teach a course a few times a semester and I absolutely love it. Exposing students to the logics of religion and the varieties of practice is extremely rewarding. We spend time looking at how understanding religion and religious behavior is a necessity in modern law, politics, and society at large. The course offers an opportunity not merely to introduce new information, but to change ways of thinking about a subject as ubiquitous as it is misunderstood.

What’s your favorite thing about Ģ����Ƶ State?

Without a doubt the people. The students are kind and thoughtful, the members of my department are phenomenal people and scholars, and CHSS and Ģ����Ƶ as a whole I’ve found to be a really collaborative place.

What are your hopes/goals for your students as they become the next generation of professional and engaged citizens of the world?

Open-mindedness paired with an ability to critically reflect upon information is something our world desperately needs. I hope our students take the lead in promoting diversity and equality in whatever field they enter, and developing civic competencies that will enhance our national and global belonging.