Bio:
Candace Lukasik earned her Ph.D. in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and she was the 2019-2020 inaugural research fellow in Coptic Orthodox Studies at Fordham University.Her first book project explores the transnational circulation of political subjectivities and religious practices through the lens of Coptic Orthodox Christian emigration from Egypt to the United States. Specifically, the project examines the geopolitical processes involved in the transformation of Middle Eastern Christians into modern-day martyrs and victims of Islamic terror by American religious and political actors, and investigates the effects those processes have on the Copts in Egypt and in diaspora. For this project, she has received a Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship for 2020-2021, funded by the Social Science Research Council and the Fetzer Institute. In addition to academic scholarship, she has written opinion editorials and short-form essays for Anthropology News, Public Orthodoxy, The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, and The Coptic Canadian History Project (CCHP), and is a curator for the Anthropology of Christianity Bibliography BlogBetween 2019-2022, she will be a participant in Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center project on Orthodoxy and Human Rights, funded by the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion and International Affairs.