Global Studies professor awarded prestigious Luce/ACLS Fellowship

Joyce Dalsheim, a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Global Studies, was named a 2018 Luce/ACLS Fellow in Religion, Journalism and International Affairs.

She will use her ethnographic research in Israel/Palestine to engage in a critical examination of the relationship between sovereignty and liberation, focusing on questions of religion and religious freedom. Her work adds new perspective to a broad set of interdisciplinary conversations on secularism and citizenship in the modern world.

“Focusing on Israeli Jews, it examines the processes through which sovereign ethnonational majorities are produced,” she wrote in her abstract. “Using stories from many different communities, this research reveals how different ways of being Jewish challenge the policies and practices of the Jewish state, and how, conversely, the existence of the Jewish state constrains the range of possible ways of being Jewish.”

Dalsheim joined the UNC Charlotte faculty in 2010 as a visiting assistant professor and became an assistant professor in 2012. She has published numerous articles and chapters, along with her books, “Unsettling Gaza: Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion and the Israeli Settlement Project” and “Producing Spoilers: Peacemaking and the Production of Enmity in a Secular Age,” both published by Oxford University Press.

She has received other prestigious fellowships, including the Rockefeller Fellowship with the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and the Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The prestigious Luce/ACLS Fellowships help scholars pursuing research on global religions to connect their scholarship to journalism and media audiences. The program, which aims to increase public understanding of the role of religion in international affairs, is possible by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.

In addition to providing fellows with a year’s leave to pursue research and outreach efforts, the Luce/ACLS Fellowships offer media training opportunities. A spring symposium brings journalists into dialogue with scholars to discuss key issues in international affairs is part of the program, too. Dalsheim will be in residence at Northwestern University for the 2018-19 academic year where she will work with colleagues at the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, including Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Brannon Ingram.

Dalsheim’s work demonstrates how scholarship in the humanities helps provide insight into contentious struggles and allows people to develop alternative conceptualizations of their histories, their lived experiences and their futures. An important goal of this fellowship is to bring this work to wider audiences, engaging with journalists and publishing in venues accessible to the broader public.

Read more on the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Exchange.