Although the Center does not currently offer its own fellowships, it welcomes affiliate guest researchers. Please contact us for more information.
Current Fellows
Jessica Knowles completed her doctoral studies at the University of Vienna in 2024. Her dissertation examined apocalyptic stained-glass, applying iconographical and narratological approaches to identifying connections to the 1405 revolt of Archbishop Richard Scrope and the theology of the fourteenth-century Yorkshire mystic, Richard Rolle. She maintains academic interests in both late medieval York and a narratological approach to late medieval images. However, her subsequent research is expanding the geographical and chronological frame of her dissertation, whilst continuing to focus on the apocalypse, and on rebellious archbishops. She is currently working on the twelfth-century stained-glass of Canterbury cathedral made just after the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, images of Becket and Scrope in manuscript miniatures, and comparing the apocalyptic glass of York with that of Nuremberg.
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Francesca Badini has been a Junior Fellow at the Foundation for Religious Studies’ Palermo office since November 2023, where she carries out her research work on translations of the Qur'ān into Italian, published from 1861 to 2000.
In 2023, Badini got her Postgraduate Diploma at the European School of Religious Sciences ‘Giuseppe Alberigo’, with a thesis entitled An Egyptian Scholar and Preacher: Muḥammad al-Ġazālī (1917 – 1996) and his tafsīr (with Prof. Johanna Pink as supervisor).
During her postgraduate years (2019 – 2023), she was a Guest Doctoral Student at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Germany), where she spent part of her time abroad and where she attended several courses to learn the German language. She also did part of her research work in Fes (Morocco), where she perfected her knowledge of Arabic.
In 2018, she holds a master’s degree in Historical and Oriental Sciences from the University of Bologna, where she discussed a thesis in the history and institutions of Islam entitled Le pious Madri della Nigrizia e i Comboniani prigionieri della Mahdiyya (1881 - 1898): memoirs and epistles.
In 2015, she graduated in Philosophy at the University of Trento, where she discussed a thesis in Islamic thought entitled Noble martyrdom and terrorist martyrdom: the role of the migration phenomenon in contemporary Islam.
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Hammoud Hamoud is a CRS postdoctoral researcher affiliated with Humboldt University Berlin and Freie Universität Berlin. He is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship, 2025-27) under the mentorship of Nadia Al-Bagdadi for a research project that studies the history of Paleo-Islam in Late Antiquity and its representation in scholarship. He holds a B.A. in Islamic Studies, as well as an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from FU Berlin (2024), where he studied with grants from the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). His thesis appeared as a monograph under the title Allāh's Genesis in Late Antiquity (in German, Die Genese Allāhs in der Spätantike, De Gruyter, 2025); it examines the emergence of Allāh within late antique polytheistic contexts. Hammoud Hamoud also authored two Arabic works that address fundamentalism, Islamism, and comparative approaches to religion: In Search of the Sacred: Revival and Fundamentalism (Baḥthan ʿan al-muqaddas: al-baʿth wa-l-uṣūliyya, Beirut 2014), and Syria and the Rise of Fundamentalism (Sūriyya wa-l-ṣuʿūd al-uṣūlī, with Aziz al Azmeh, Beirut 2016). He has translated various scholarly works into Arabic and collaborated in a publication of the CRS/Carnegie Project Striking from the Margins.
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Emy Merin Joy is a doctoral graduate of the CEU Department of Historical Studies. She studies the largely unexplored corpus of early modern Christian sources from Kerala, India, texts written in Garshuni Malayalam—a hybrid script composed of East Syriac, ancient Malayalam (Vatteḻuttә and Kōleḻuttә), and Grantha scripts. Emy Joy earned her BA and MA in English Language and Literature from the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), India, before completing her MPhil in Social Sciences from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). She received an MA in Medieval Studies from CEU, writing a thesis on vernacular church histories. Her PhD research explored a sixteenth-century missionary text in Garshuni Malayalam, the Paravur Dialogues, in its linguistic, literary, theological, historical, and socio-cultural aspects.
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Benedetta Manfrinetti is a CRS Research Fellow during the 2025-2026 Academic Year. She holds an MA in Classical Philology (2022) from Sapienza University of Rome and a Licence in Jewish-Christian Relationships (2024) from Pontifical Gregorian University. Since 2024, she is a PhD student in the Italian Doctoral School for Religious Studies (DREST) at the University of Modena-Reggio Emilia. Her project explores the reception of Moses Maimonides’ philosophical and legal thought in the diaspora of the Iberian New Christians during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the focus of her research stands the "Treasury of Commandments" (Tesoro de Preceptos), a manual of Jewish law (Halakha) that the Venetian rabbi Isaac Athias published in Spanish in 1627. Starting from a linguistic analysis and then moving to a content-based approach, the Tesoro de Preceptos will be compared with Maimonides’ most important halakhic works (Sefer ha-Mitzvot, Mishneh Torah, Moreh Nevukhim).______________________________________________________________
Nikola Pantić earned his PhD degree from the CEU Department of History; his thesis appeared under the title Sufism in Ottoman Damascus: Religion, Magic, and the Eighteenth-Century Networks of the Holy (Routledge, 2024). He is a Permanent Fellow at the Center for Religious Studies, CEU, and a postdoc researcher and lecturer at the Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Vienna. He studies religious establishments and charismatic authority in early modern Ottoman Sunnism, and focuses on the history of the beliefs in grace, wonder-workers, cults of saints, and thaumaturgical rituals in Islam before modernity.
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Martin Pjecha is a doctoral graduate of the CEU History Department and the author of Theo-Politics of the Hussite Movement: From Reform to Revolution (Brill, 2024). He is currently working on his second monograph, Politics in the Holistic Thought of Jan Comenius. This project examines the political thought of Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670), who served as bishop in the Unity of Brethren, the dissident community that preceded the Moravian Church. Comenius represents an alternative intellectual trajectory between Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment universalism, competing with the “realist” tradition of Machiavelli and Hobbes. Despite extensive scholarship on Comenius’s pedagogical, philosophical, and religious work, a comprehensive synthesis of his political thought remains a desideratum. Central to this study is a deeper understanding of the pan-European, interconfessional influences Comenius engaged with, especially his unique Central European context. As a leader of his heterodox religious community during the Thirty Years’ War, Comenius was exiled from Bohemia by the Counter-Reformation and was deeply disillusioned by the enduring strength of Catholic powers following the Peace of Westphalia. His outspoken opposition to the peace settlement increasingly drew him to circles of prophetic visionaries who foresaw cataclysmic restitution.