Interview with 2025 Iles Award Winner Patrick Dunn

Congratulations to CSR’s latest Iles Award winner, Patrick Dunn!

Patrick Dunn is a writer, teacher, and researcher – now a Ph.D student in Comparative Studies and a teaching associate at Ohio State University. He investigates religion and its complex channels of influence in the modern world. His current research focuses on UFO/UAP and contact experiences, secrecy, and anomalous spiritualities. From 2013 to 2023, he lived and practiced as a full-time monastic at Great Vow Zen Monastery and was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest in 2018. He holds an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and a B.Phil in Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Asian Studies from the University of Pittsburgh Honors College. Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’S Graduate Research Associate, sat down with Patrick to see what the CSR’s Iles Award means for his research!

Shurouq: Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your research?

Patrick: Absolutely. My name is Patrick Dunn. That’s the name I was given at birth. I actually have had a different for most of the last decade which is kind of strange because I lived in a Zen Buddhist monastery. The work that I’m doing now relates to the modern UFO phenomena and its relationship to the history of religions and it’s a complex relationship. Basically, thousands of people everyday, really, have direct, genuine experiences with anomalous phenomena and many of those experiences we think of in terms of UFOs. It’s a vague and ambiguous term, deliberately so. What’s happening in these experiences is in many ways a mystery, but I think one helpful way to approach it is as a kind of living myth. We need to think of it as a modern mythic manifestation that is being acted out in real life, in people’s experiences, in their relationships, and how they think about their experiences. So, in some ways, I am just kind of along for the ride, as a scholar, thinking about these extremely fascinating, strange, and revealing incidents along with the people who are experiencing them.

Shurouq: Fascinating! Could you tell us more directly how your research is informed by religious studies or intersects with the study of religion as a field?

Patrick: Sure. The language of UFOs and the whole framework within which we talk about this kind of modern UFO phenomenon is in some ways an obscuration of the fact that these things have been happening for thousands of years. And we’re actually talking about a pattern of phenomena that is very ancient and that has deep roots that extend into the history of religions and folklore and magic and mythology. That’s not to say that all religion is really just encounters with aliens. That’s kind of the popular ancient alien narrative that is oversimplifying and isn’t really based on a scholarly understanding of the history of religions. So, it’s important to see that religion is way more complex than a narrative like that suggests. But these encounters, UFO encounters, if we want to think of it that way, are very much a part of the history of religions. I think we can say that in some ways we’re not talking about two separate phenomena. We’re talking about one continuous manifestation that we’ve come to think of in different ways of modern technology and science.

Shurouq: And what does receiving Iles Award mean for your research? And how will it advance it research? What do you think you’ll use the grant towards?

Patrick: It’s an extremely supportive grant to receive. It’s very meaningful also because of its connection to Dr. Sarah Iles Johnston and her family and her parents. So it’s very meaningful in that way to receive that award. And in this case it will help me to connect with the living communities that are engaged in myth-making practices now, today, largely born of their own experiences. There’s a whole kind of hidden world of science, technology, political advocacy, but most of all just ordinary people living their lives in the midst of encounters with the strange and profound that aren’t always recognized. There’s a long history of meeting those experiences with ridicule and stigmatization and rejecting them, denying them. So, this summer I’m planning to attend a couple conferences, and the grant is going to help me to do that. And those are conferences where experiencers get together to share their stories and to learn from each other and really to cope with the challenges of living with these more-than-human forces.

Shurouq: Amazing! Congratulations again on winning the award!

Why Study Religion? with Graduate Student Nikoo Karimi

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Nikoo Karimi, a graduate student in Comparative Studies, study religion? Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’s Graduate Research Associate, interviewed Nikoo to find out. Watch the video below for her response!

Shurouq: How would you answer the question: Why study religion?

Transcript:

Nikoo Karimi:

So, religion is one of the most powerful forces that shapes human experiences. I personally enjoy studying digital media, social media, and movements like activism in these social medias, and also studying people’s affects and emotions in these mediums. So, I think religion in these areas intersects with many of my interests. It intersects with storytelling, narrative, affect and also social movements. Religion is not just about history; it engages with the contemporary world, and it’s tied to people’s lives and emotions. It kind of provides a language for emotions like shame, grief, hope, and it helps people; it informs how people experience injustice, belonging, and also resistance. Another part of my interests is studying about diasporic communities and identities, and I think religion plays a crucial role in these communities to form their identities. For example, displaced communities–they use religion to maintain a sense of home with rituals and storytelling. And also in digital spaces, we see that religious discourses spread rapidly and they shape how people are becoming politically active and even the emotions that people express in online medias. I think by studying religion academically, we can move beyond just understanding of religion as a pure private thing, and we can see how central it is to the way people make meaning of their lives and the world around them.

 

Nikoo Karimi is a graduate student in Comparative Studies at Ohio State University, with a background in Persian literature and literary criticism. Her research interests include children’s literature, diaspora studies, and science and technology studies.

Why Study Religion? with Postdoctoral Scholar Helen Murphey

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Dr. Helen Murphey, a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Mershon Center, study religion? Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’s Graduate Research Associate, interviewed Helen to find out. Watch the video below for her response!

Shurouq: How would you answer the question: Why study religion?

Transcript:

Dr. Helen Murphey:

I think it’s really important to understand how religion influences political behavior as a political scientist. So, I study religious social movements in North Africa and globally, as well as religious populism, and I think it’s really essential to see show religion informs not just worldview and ideology, but also identity and belonging. I think there’s often a tendency to view religion as being reducible to texts or practices or institutions, and while these are certainly important, my research also suggests that perceptions of religious belonging have a profound influence on how people contextualizw their sense of who they are vis-a-vis the world around them.  And this really matters a lot for understanding political mobilization. So, to appeal to certain groups, politicians may use religiously salient narratives or phrases or draw on certain symbols to express the kind of identification with a particular group, even if the significance of this language or of this style may be not necessarily understood as much by the wider public.

And at the same, understanding the complex ways that religious ideas and identities are embedded in our societies also helps to understand this connection between religion and politics beyond a religious-secular binary that I think is very common. For example, in even supposedly secular socities, such as one of the case studies I look at, Tunisia, prior to the 2011 revolution, religion did play a really big role in nation-building and creating a unified sense of national identity. And what what called secularism also involved quite heavy-handed control of the religious sphere. So I think it’s really important to see how categories like religious politics and secularism are historically constructed, how they intersect with structural power dynamics, and how they act as signifiers for different social and political visions in various ways. And I think, equally, this helps us to understand that religious identities and their political significance are not fixed and, in fact, are quite heavily contested. My research highlights the importance of socialization for religious movements where—through interactions with external factors, or through processes of internal contestation—these ideas and identities can and do shift in complex and very interesting ways.

 

Helen Murphey is a postdoctoral scholar at the Mershon Center. She received her Ph.D in International Relations at the University of St. Andrews in 2023. Her research focuses on the role of identity and ideology in politics, with a specialization in religious political parties in North Africa, populism, conspiracy theories and polarization. 

Why Study Religion? with Ph.D Student Alyssa Bedrosian

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Alyssa Bedrosian, a Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, study religion? Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’s Graduate Research Associate, interviewed Alyssa to find out. Watch the video below for her response!

Shurouq: How would you answer the question: Why study religion?

Transcript:

Alyssa Bedrosian:

My research explores Catholic feminism and abortion rights activism in the United States and in Latin America. So, I am really interested in this relationship between feminism and religion broadly, and feminism and Catholicism specifically, and the potential of Catholic feminism and other religious feminisms to advance abortion rights.

What I have really found through my research is that most feminist scholarship tends to ignore religion and/or dismiss women’s religiosity. When feminist scholarship does address religion, it tends to focus on religious fundamentalisms without recognizing the plurality and diversity that characterize many religious traditions. And for me, this results in feminist scholarship and feminist activism that I think really falls short. Across the United States and Latin America, where my research is focused, most people identify as Christian, with women tending to be more religious than men. But, feminist scholarship continues to dismiss the religious beliefs and the religious practices of most people in the Americas.

Feminist scholar bell hooks talks a lot about the importance of building a mass feminist movement that is accessible and speaks to a lot of different people. And so, I think to do this, we need to start having nuanced conversations about religion and feminism.

 

Alyssa Bedrosian is a fourth-year Ph.D student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies and a 2024-25 Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme Graduate Team Fellow. Bedrosian’s interdisciplinary research explores feminisms in Latin America and the United States. Her dissertation examines twenty-first-century Catholic feminism and abortion rights activism in Mexico, Argentina, and the United States. 

Why Study Religion? with Graduate Student Karin Ikeda

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does graduate affiliate Karin Ikeda study religion? Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’s Graduate Research Associate, interviewed Karin to find out. Watch the video below for her response!

Shurouq: How would you answer the question: Why study religion?

Transcript:

Karin Ikeda:

I was born and raised in Japan, and Japanese people tend to think of themselves as not religious, and the word religion has a really bad connotation to it because of World War II. And also, there are modern movements that try to abolish superstitions, and…Oumu-Shinrikyo incidents in the 90s, [when] a religious cult…carried out a terrorist attack on thousands of people who were commuting via subway. And in Japan, religion and cults are almost synonymous, but we have a Buddhist and Shintoist tradition. We have rituals, festivals, and ceremonies embedded in our culture. For example, in New Year, I go to a shrine to pray for good health and fortune almost every year with my family. And when I had a university entrance exam, I bought a talisman from a shrine or temple to wish for good luck. We also have Christmas in Japan, and it’s quite popular to do weddings in a western style with a fake minister who is normally like a random Western guy. I always like to learn about new cultures from different countries, and religion has always been a fundamental part of it. And I find it fascinating that even though Buddhism and Shintoism are shaping the fundamental part of Japanese culture, and Christianity has a huge influence on our culture, we act like we’re so rational and not religious at all. Most younger Japanese people will do all the things that I mentioned, and they will fully believe that they’re not religious at all. I find it fascinating and that’s why I first was drawn to religious studies.

 

Karin Ikeda is an M.A. student in the Department of Comparative Studies. She is also a CSR Graduate Affiliate. With a background in religious studies, she is interested in contemporary spiritual movements in Asia and the U.S. and the reception of Asian religions in the U.S.

Interview with 2024 Iles Award Winner Matt Maynard

Matt Maynard is a PhD candidate in Classics. He is writing a dissertation on the god Pan and ancient Greek ideas about wilderness. Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’S Graduate Research Associate, sat down with Matt to see what the CSR’s Iles Award means for his research!

Shurouq: Could you tell us what you’re working on?

Matt: Sure. I’m a Ph.D student in the Department of Classics. I’m currently in the end stages of my dissertation work. I am planning to graduate this summer. About my work: I began my graduate studies with a general focus on the religious thought and practices of the ancient Greeks and then I came to focus on the god Pan in particular, who is a god who held particular significance to shepherds, and who was thought to dwell in the wild places of the world. At the same time, I’ve been digging into the newish field of eco-criticism and finding that some of the ideas that have come out of that field have potential to change the way that we read landscape and environment not only in literature but in other forms of  cultural expression like myth and religious beliefs, too. I have been bringing those ideas into my study of the god Pan to just think through Ancient Greek ideas about the natural world.

Shurouq: Nice, that’s fascinating! So you already touched on this, but how would you expand on this to say how your research intersects more with the study of religion?

Matt: I look at a number of texts and myths concerning Pan for my dissertation, but I focus primarily on a poem that’s known as the Homeric hymn to Pan, which was composed — we don’t know exactly — but some time in the 6th or 5th century B.C. As a hymn, the poem has a clear religious orientation, so a big part of what I am doing is commenting on the relationship between religion and the environment, and I look at other Greek hymns too and suggest that these occasions for religious expression were also felt by the Greeks to be apt occasions for reflections on human ecology, not just in terms of our place in the cosmos, but also more narrowly our place and function on the earth with regard to other life forms and materials that we share this place with.

Shurouq: Thank you. And my last question, how is the Iles Award meaningful for your research? How will you use it to expand on your work?

Matt: It’s a great encouragement first of all for me to keep working with these ideas, and it’s a real validation that my project has some legs. I would say it’s especially gratifying to see that people from outside of my home department saw some worth and took an interest in what I have been working on. Eco-criticism is by its nature an interdiscplinary field that seeks out and really needs conversation between people with different specializations. The financial support is of course very welcome, too. And getting to the end of a Ph.D I’m finding is a very hectic time, so the award has also made it possible to take a little bit of time and develop this project, hopefully, into something that’s publishable.

Shurouq: Wonderful! Thank you, Matt!

Why Study Religion? with Dr. Bradley Dubos

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Dr. Bradley Dubos, Provost’s Fellow in English and CSR affiliate faculty, think it’s important to study religion? Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’s Graduate Research Associate interviewed Dr. Dubos to find out. Watch the video below for his response!

Shurouq: How would you answer the question: Why study religion?

Transcript:

Dr. Bradley Dubos:

So I study U.S. and indigenous literatures. And for me, there are really two major draws for thinking about religion and literature together.

The first is that religion is a site of incredible human creativity. Religion matters to so many people across different cultures throughout history, and when something matters, people get creative with it. So if we look at literary works, or art, or other works that address religious ideas, we’ll find that religion is often an opportunity for heightened creative expression, for stretching the imagination to make sense of some of these big, difficult questions that we confront. And we’ll also see writers and artists drawing on religion as a resource for creative forms of community building and placemaking. One of the things that interests me about early American history in particular is that many of the earliest and most influential Native American and African American writers are deeply engaged with religious beliefs and vocabularies and spaces. But they also powerfully transform these beliefs and vocabularies and spaces in totally creative and visionary ways that continue to shape what America is today. So that’s creativity.

The other draw for me is that studying religion can help us understand how important religion is to how we organize and experience our worlds — so our sense of place. And we could think of this in really big terms. What is the relationship between Earth and the cosmos? Why are we here? What is our purpose? What are our responsibilities on this planet? But we could also scale it down and think about it on a more everyday level. So, living in the United States, just moving through our daily lives, we might pass different places of worship. We might come across places that considered sacred or set apart in some way, such as cemeteries. We might see religious language and iconography around us, even in supposedly secular or political spaces. There’s a true diversity of beliefs and practices reflected around us that are carving out all these different religious spaces. And so, even for those who don’t identify as religious, these religious landscapes still impact the ways that we all orient ourselves and move through the world.

Dr. Bradley Dubos is a Provost’s Fellow in Native American Literature and Culture in the Department of English. He is a collaborative faculty member in the American Indian Studies program and a faculty affiliate of the Center for the Study of Religion. Dr. Dubos specializes in pre-1900 U.S. literatures and Native American and Indigenous literatures. His research interests include Indigenous poetry, American religious traditions, placemaking, and place-based pedagogy. To read more about Dr. Dubos’ research, please visit his professional profile. 

Victor Vimos Wins CSR Award

Congratulations to Victor Vimos on winning a CSR Research/Travel Award! Victor is a third-year Ph.D student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Read about his research project below!

The Wamani: representation and behaviors of mountain in the mythology of Quechua community during the war.

In the Ecuadorian town where I grew up, I was warned that the mountains could steal my soul. To avoid this I had to greet them and, as if they were grandparents, be respectful to them. Years later, accompanying a group of Peruvian farmers to place an offering in the mountains, they warned me that he was hungry and, therefore, could eat me. Smoking, whistling, and strictly following the ritual to please the mountain were ways to stay safe. Numerous myths in the Andes describe the man-mountain relationship and constitute social discourses in which both have agency and will for their interaction. This principle orders the symbolic representations and behaviors attributed to the mountain and is an essential element of the mythical imaginary that informs contemporary religiosity in this region.

My project traces the symbolic representations and behaviors attributed to the mountain in the mythical imagination of Víctor Fajardo, a Quechua community of Ayacucho, during the period of political violence (1980-2000) in Peru, where the conflict between the Army and the Shining Path left 70,000 victims, the majority belonging to the Quechua and Ayamara population of the central and southern regions of the country.

In the myths of the Ayacucho region, the mountain is called Wamani. People frequently turn it as a source of power to guarantee the fertility, health and protection of animals and men, as long as they give offerings through specific rituals throughout the year. The works of Hiroyasu Tomoeda (1980) and Néstor Taype (2010) have shown that the Wamani is symbolically represented in the myths of Ayacucho as an old man, a mammal or a bird. Billie Jean Isbell (2005) observes these representations as the embodiment of behaviors with which mountains affect, positively or negatively, the social framework in which they are inscribed. My work aims to observe how war impacts could have transformed the mythical imaginary, inserting new representations of the mountain, while modifying the practices that emerge from it. I argued that the period of political violence affected the representation and behaviors attributed to the Wamani, altering the social discourses of the mountain man-religion bond. I maintain that by analyzing the agrarian and livestock songs in the community of Víctor Fajardo, where the relationship between man and the mountain is narrated, the forms and functions attributed to the Wamani will be observed and, therefore, it will be possible to determine the impact and dimension that the war had on the mythical imagination.

This project is part of my doctoral thesis that analyzes the impacts of war on the man-mountain relationship in the Quechua regions of Peru. It basis is interdisciplinary, combining my backgrounds in anthropology and literary studies. I include literary materials (novels, poetry) and anthropological materials (myths, songs, and ethnography) to trace relationships between man and the mountain, rituality as a mediator between them, and poetic languages to inscription and updating of mythical contents during the war.

Why Study Religion? with Alumnus Seth Gaiters

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Dr. Seth Gaiters, a Comparative Studies alumnus, think it’s important to study religion? Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’s Graduate Research Associate interviewed Dr. Gaiters to find out. Watch the video below for his response!

Shurouq: How would you answer the question: Why study religion?

Transcript:

Dr. Seth Gaiters:

I’ve been shaped and formed within a religious matrix, particularly within Black Christianity. So, even before I was born — there are stories of my mother singing hymns to me, while I’m in her womb, playing at the piano. I grew up in the thing. So then, when I realized what I’m within and the discourses that formed me and are swirling around me, I started to have questions. And so, I have a particular experience that is particularly unique; however, when I started to look more critically at the human experience in all our various particularities, one of the things I found was that religion is how people make sense of the ultimate significance of their lives. Religion — whatever that is — religions are the ways in which we orient ourselves in order to deal with shifting landscapes and suffering and pain and these ultimate questions about meaning in life. And I’ve found that people of the world…have these kinds of questions, have these kinds of struggles, and so the inversive is that I became intrigued about how this teaches me something about what it means to be human. And all of that complicated stuff that I just said, it matters to people. And if I’m concerned about people and the mattering of people, I want to understand what matters to them, and so religion helps me to get at those really deep questions.

 

Dr. Seth Emmanuel Gaiters received his Ph.D in Comparative Studies at OSU. He is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion and Africana Studies at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. His research examines African American religious studies, with particular interest in the exploration of religion and race through Black progressive social movements and cultures in America. He is currently completing a book manuscript, tentatively titled, #BlackLivesMatter and Religion in the Street: A Revival of the Sacred in the Public Sphere. 

Why Study Religion? with Alumnus Damon T. Berry

Why Study Religion? is a video series in which the CSR asks its faculty, students, staff, and guests what is important to them about the academic study of religion and why more folks should consider pursuing it. Find out more about the Center and its initiatives HERE. To learn more about OSU’s Religious Studies Major, visit our website at THIS LINK.

Why does Dr. Damon T. Berry, a Comparative Studies alumnus, think it’s important to study religion? Shurouq Ibrahim, CSR’s Graduate Research Associate interviewed Dr. Berry to find out. Watch the video below for his response!

Shurouq: Why is the study of religion important?

Transcript:

Dr. Damon T. Berry:

One, if you take the classical notion of what it meant to study the humanities or liberal arts, which was — and still is in ways that people don’t acknowledge — the foundation of higher education. The whole point of it wasn’t just so that you could be good at producing widgets. The point of it was to make a more well-rounded person who could engage very purposefully as a citizen, as someone who belongs to a community, has a certain situation in that community, has relative relationships of power in that context, and to act accordingly — to know yourself and your world well enough to engage intelligently with it. So I would argue that anybody benefits by studying religion — just by nature of the ways it’s going to make you engage with questions that you don’t otherwise get to engage with.

On the more immediate level, there’s no way that you’re going to talk about freedom in the American context, or the modern liberal democratic context, without having to wrestle with religion. In my Intro class, and in other contexts, when I talk about the history of religion in America, for example, we can’t not talk about the First Amendment, Article VI — which are the only two places where religion is mentioned in the Constitution — and the fact that religion is never defined in American law. And then you have subsequent legislation that affects people’s reproductive rights, it affects all sorts of things. So, whether you’re in business, whether you’re going to work in a law office, or you’re just going to be a person living in a modern liberal democracy, you have to know about these things. And if you don’t, there’s going to be a lot you don’t understand about why things are going the way they’re going. And in the context of religious freedom, this is on the UN Charter of Human Rights, so I don’t know if there’s a place on the planet where you can live where you don’t have to think about that.

 

Dr. Damon T. Berry received his Ph.D in Comparative Studies from OSU. He is currently an Associate Professor of Religion and Chair of Religious Studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. His research focuses on the imbrication of religious and racialized discourses that shape and inform ideologies and practices of exclusion and violence. He has published in several venues on topics such as religion and violence and the history of racist movements. He has written three monographs: Blood and Faith: Christianity in American White Nationalism , Christianity & The Alt-Right: Exploring the Relationship, and most recently, The New Apostolic Reformation, Trump, and Evangelical Politics.