Online Bachelor of Arts Religious Studies

Iqbal Akhtar

Dr. Iqbal Akhtar is an Professor with a dual appointment in the departments of Religious Studies and Politics & International Relations within the School of International and Public Affairs. He completed his doctorate at the University of Edinburgh’s New College School of Divinity. His current work explores the origin of the Khōjā peoples in the Subcontinent through extant oral traditions known as the kahaṇī in Sindhi, Gujarati, and Hindustani.

Daniel Alvarez

Professor Alvarez's teaching and research interests have been primarily in the areas of Christian theology and world religions, with emphasis on Protestantism, Evangelicalism and 19th century liberal theology. Having been raised as a Fundamentalist Christian, he has developed a life-long interest in the varieties of religious Fundamentalisms. Outside of Christianity, Buddhism and Islam are the religions with which he is best acquainted and those that have exercised his thinking the most. 

Whitney Bauman

Professor Bauman's teaching and research interests in Religious Studies fall within the broad field of "Religion and Ecology." The driving question of his interests and commitments to the field is: How do religious beliefs, insights, doctrines, and practices shape the material-physical worlds around us? This question assumes that some sort of "religious sentiment" is part of what it means to be a human being in the world. He is interested in analyzing how these "big questions" are changed by forces such as global climate change and globalization. 

Ana María Bidegain

Dr. Ana María Bidegain was born in Colonia Suiza, Uruguay. She studied History in Uruguay and Belgium, where she earned her PhD, with great distinction at the Catholic University of Louvain. She developed her academic career in Colombia, where she lived and taught for more than 20 years. Dr. Bidegain founded the History Department in the University of Los Andes and opened the field of Religious Studies at the National University of Colombia. In the 2003-2004 biennium, she directed the Social Sciences Research Center of the National University of Colombia. Prior to joining us here at Florida International University, Ana Maria was a Visiting Professor in Harvard’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program.

Erik Larson

Dr. Larson's interest focuses on the interaction between religion, language and culture began when he was an undergraduate student at the American University of Beirut.  At FIU, he teaches classes on the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, Biblical Archaeology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, Early Christian History, Islam, and World Religions. He also teaches language classes on Biblical Hebrew, New Testament Greek, and Classical Arabic.

Tudor Parfitt

Dr. Tudor Parfitt founded the Centre of Jewish Studies at SOAS and was its director from 1993 to 2006 and from 2010-11. He was also Chair of the Middle East Centre at SOAS for 4 years and Chair of the SOAS Senior Common Room for 15 years. In 2012 he was Distinguished Visiting Scholar, (Global Engagement Program) at the University of Pennsylvania, Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow (Spring Term) at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Harvard University (where he gave the Huggins Lectures in 2011) and Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research, Cape Town, South Africa. In 2012 he was appointed President Navon Professor of Sephardi and Mizrahi Studies and SIPA Research Professor at FIU.

Samani Unnata Pragya

Professor Pragya has been teaching since 2004 as an Assistant Professor in Jainology Department in JVBU. She is also an Adjunct Faculty at Florida International University teaching courses like ‘Meditation & Spiritual Development’, Intro to Asian Religions, Religion Life & vegetarianism, Healing in Asian Religions since 2007.  Her advanced stidues include the study of Jainism and other philosophies under the spiritual guidance of the Anushasta of the JVBI, H.H. Acaraya Mahaprajna. The study included Jain Scriptures, Indian Philosophy,Western Philosophy & others by H.H. Acharya Mahapragya himself as well as other scholars including: Prof. Dayanand Bhargava, Aruna Kumar Mukharji, Pandit Vishwanath Mishra.

Oren Baruch Stier

Professor Stier's main area of interest is Jewish Cultural Studies, with a special emphasis on the contemporary period and all aspects of present-day Jewish life and thought. His ongoing current research concerns Holocaust memory and representation: He has published one book on this topic, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), which addresses the roles the contemporary media and modes of cultural mediation play in shaping consciousness of the legacy of the Holocaust, especially in the form of its institutionalized memory. He is currently working on a second book in this area of research, Holocaust Symbols: The Icons of Memory, which deals with the historical and memorial contexts of several fundamental images associated with the Holocaust.

Steven Vose 

Dr. Vose's main areas for research and teaching are the religious traditions of South Asia, primarily in Jainism and secondarily in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam.  Dr. Vose is interested in devotional practices as public religious expressions, especially pilgrimage and temple ritual; and the place of “tantra” and alchemy in medieval Indian society. Dr. Vose also works on the development of vernacular literary traditions, especially in Old Gujarati, and the interaction of Sanskrit, Prakrit and vernacular languages and literatures.  

Erin Weston

For her undergraduate work, Professor Weston received a BA in Religious Studies, a BA in Philosophy, and a Certificate in Women’s Studies from FIU. She has a Master’s Degree in Religious Studies (1999) and a Master’s Degree in Asian Studies (2006) both from FIU. Her Religious Studies thesis focused on a contemporary Japanese religion named Mahikari in the Caribbean island of Martinique. For her final paper in Asian Studies, she wrote about changes in the Shakyamuni Buddha’s iconography as Buddhism spread throughout various locations in Asia.

Albert Wuaku

Professor Wuaku holds a Ph.D. degree in Religious Studies from the Center for the Study of Religions at the University of Toronto in Canada. He went to the University of Toronto after completing a BA at the University of Ghana, a Certificate in Peace studies at the University of Oslo in Norway and a MA in Religion and Society at McMaster University in Canada.