Candace Lukasik

Candace Lukasik is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Mississippi State University and a former postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her research focuses on the intersections of transnational migration, religion, race, and empire. Her first book Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of U.S. Empire (under contract with New York University Press) examines the everyday processes and practices that shape transnational Coptic communal formation and belonging as it interfaces with the tension between their minority status in Egypt and their racial-religious placement within an American Christian conservative landscape. Her work on Middle Eastern Christianity and migration has received support from the American Association of University Women, the American Academy of Religion, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Louisville Institute, the Fetzer Institute, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University, among others.

Her scholarship has appeared in American Anthropologist, the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Middle East Critique, and edited volumes with UNC Press and Rutgers University Press, among others. In addition to Public Orthodoxy, she has published opinion editorials and short-form essays in The Immanent Frame, Berkley Forum, Anthropology News, and The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, and she sits on the board of Egypt Migrations. She currently serves on the steering committees for the Middle Eastern Christianity, Anthropology of Religion, and Religion and Politics units of the American Academy of Religion. You can find her full CV here.