Isak Tranvik has been awarded a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
"The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has awarded 21 promising scholars Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships. The Newcombe Fellowship is the nation’s largest and most prestigious award for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences addressing questions of ethical and religious values. Funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Fellowship was created in 1981 and has supported just over 1,200 doctoral candidates, most of them now noted faculty at domestic and foreign institutions."
"My dissertation," Tranvik writes, "examines the theories of citizenship underpinning popular politics practiced by 'spiritual' or 'religious' groups. Drawing on the political thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Vaclav Havel, among others, I argue that a more capacious sense of citizenship can be a powerful democratic resource. Yet because it can also undermine pluralistic forms of politics, I am developing a framework to distinguish between types of citizenship that may threaten democratic forms of politics and those that strengthen it."
Visit the press release for the Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation
Visit the Duke Graduate School's reporting on the Newcombe Fellowship
Political Science