Graduate Student News

Congratulations to Brooke Sherrard, M.A. student in Religious Studies, who won a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship to study Arabic in Amman, Jordan, this summer.  FLAS fellowships are funded by a Title VI National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education.  UI International Programs administers the fellowship program.

Michael Baltutis has been awarded a Fulbright Grant for the 2005-06 academic year that will support the ethnographic and historical research for his Ph.D. thesis on the Indrajatra festival of Kathmandu, Nepal.  Congratulations Michael!  Watch for more information in our Fall 2005 newsletter Perspectives, coming this December.

Congratulations to Steve Fink on winning an Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the University of Iowa.  Steve was selected by the Council on Teaching for his excellent teaching.  A reception to honor the recipients was held on April 29.

Student Wins 2005 Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship

Thomas Niblock, an Economics and Religious Studies major from Nevada, Iowa, has been awarded a prestigious national scholarship funded by the United States Department of State and administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. Twenty Pickering Fellowships are awarded nationally each year.  As a Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellow, Niblock has won a full scholarship for his junior and senior years at The University of Iowa, and for his first year of graduate school. During summer of 2006 he will attend the Junior Year Summer Institute, during which he will spend seven weeks at a public policy graduate school studying economics, calculus, and policy analysis.  He will also serve the Department of State in two paid summer internships, one domestic and one overseas.  Following his graduate work, Niblock will be required to serve a minimum 4.5 year appointment as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer.  Click here to see the University of Iowa News Release.

Congratulations to Achievement Award Winners!

This year's student achievement awards were presented at the annual Adler Luncheon on May 9.  The following students received awards: 

Faculty Appointment

The Department of Religious Studies is pleased to announce the appointment of Howard B. Rhodes, who will join the department in August as Assistant Professor of Religion, Politics and Social Justice.  He will receive his Ph.D. from Princeton University in the Department of Religion.  His special interests are in the history of Western theology, religious ethics and war, religion and social theory, political philosophy, and contemporary virtue ethics.

Faculty News

Professor J. Kenneth Kuntz has recently been recognized for excellent teaching through the "Thank a Teacher" program sponsored by the University's Center for Teaching.  Specifically, he was nominated by a student currently enrolled in his undergraduate course entitled, "Personalities of the Old Testament."

Undergraduate News

The Alpha of Iowa chapter is pleased to announce that the following Religious Studies students have been invited to accept membership in the Phi Beta Kappa Society:  Brian Diebold, Jonathan Lien, and John McAnelly.

Symposium Honoring Professor Dwight Bozeman

The History Department and the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa had a symposium on February 25 in honor of the recent publication of Theodore Dwight Bozeman's The Precisionist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638, by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, and of Professor Bozeman's ongoing contributions to the study of the transatlantic puritan movement.  The symposium began on Friday, February 25 with a public forum.  Featured speakers included T. Dwight Bozeman, Professor of History and of Religious Studies, University of Iowa; Francis J. Bremer, Professor of History, Millersville University of Pennsylvania; and Michael P. Winship, Professor of History, University of Georgia.  On Saturday, February 26, the speakers reassembled for a roundtable discussion of new directions and opportunities in the study of early modern history and religion in a transatlantic context.