Dr. Ani Sarkissian awarded Global Religion Research Initiative grant
April 6, 2020
Dr. Sarkassian has been named as the winner of a Project Launch grant to research The Role of Religious Ministries in Arab Monarchies. She will conducting the project with Ann Wainscott, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Miami University.
Their project was one of six projects receiving the Global Religion Research Initiative awards. The GRRI received more than 46 research proposals from scholars at 36 colleges and universities around the world in the third round of competition, which closed in mid-October 2019. The submissions were reviewed by leading social science scholars.
Housed at the University of Notre Dame's Center for the Study of Religion and Society within the Department of Sociology, the GRRI is dedicated to supporting the study of religion in global perspective in order to address two weaknesses in contemporary scholarship, namely the neglect of religion as a subject of study in the social sciences and relative neglect of religions outside of the North Atlantic region.
Dr. Sarkissian specializes in the study of religion and politics, democratization, authoritarianism, and civil society. She is the author of The Varieties of Religious Repression: Why Governments Restrict Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015), and her work on religion and politics in the MENA region and the former Soviet Union has appeared in multiple academic journals. Sarkissian earned her Ph.D. in political science from UCLA.