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Faculty and Staff

Alexander Hsu

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Assistant Teaching Professor

4159 Jenkins Hall
(574) 631-7093
ahsu@nd.edu

Alexander O. Hsu is an assistant teaching professor of global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He is an academic advisor at the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion and also the director of undergraduate studies at the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. His research focuses on early Buddhist scriptures in medieval China and employs perspectives from manuscript studies, genre theory, and cultural history in order to examine how the use of texts reflects transformations in religious reading practices. Hsu’s current book project examines why and how medieval Chinese Buddhists used anthologies to “economize” their gigantic scriptural canon.

Rebekah Go

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Program and Communications Manager

4155 Jenkins Hall
(574) 631-4371
rgo@nd.edu

Rebekah Go serves as the Program and Communication Manager for the Ansari Institute within the Keough School of Global Affairs. Prior to this she served as the Director of the Offie for the Common Good at Saint Mary's College and before that as the Program Coordinator for the ESTEEM Graduate Program at the University of Notre Dame. Rebekah has more than two decades of experience in nonprofit administration both in higher education and in social service organizations.

Rose Luminiello

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Assistant Teaching Professor

4161 Jenkins Nanovic Halls
(574) 631-5504
rluminie@nd.edu

Rose Luminiello is an assistant teaching professor in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching focus on Catholic social teaching, religion and political resistance, and identity-building, with a special focus on migration, Ireland and Poland. As a comparative and intellectual historian of modern Europe and migration, with a focus on the intellectual and social histories of Catholic political protest and resistance in Ireland and Poland, her research focus is on building out the intellectual hinterlands of Catholic social teaching and its foundations in the papacy and philosophy of Pope Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum (1891), setting these in the global context of Catholic political engagement.

Josh Lupo

Assistant Director of Research and Editorial Strategy

jlupo@nd.edu

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Josh is the assistant director of research and editorial strategy. In this role he acts as the editor for the Contending Modernities blog, provides research support for Ansari Institute projects, and manages the editorial process for manuscripts published in the Contending Modernities series at the University of Notre Dame Press. Josh received his Ph.D. in 2018 from Florida State University's Department of Religion. His forthcoming book with the University of Notre Dame Press, After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion, analyzes how phenomenologists of religion in the first half of the twentieth century appropriated—and misunderstood—classical philosophical phenomenology, and argues that Heidegger's existential phenomenology is a model for scholarly critique in the contemporary study of religion. With Atalia Omer he is the co-editor of Religion, Modernity, and the Global Afterlives of Colonialism (UND press, 2024); Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (UND press, 2023), and Religion and Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (UND press, 2022). With Ebrahim Moosa he is the co-editor of the forthcoming volume Engaging the Madrasa: Education and Islamic Thought in a Changing World (UND press, 2026).

Ebrahim Moosa

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Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies

1010 Jenkins Nanovic Halls
574-631-1204
emoosa1@nd.edu

Ebrahim Moosa (PhD, University of Cape Town 1995) is Mirza Family Professor of Islamic Thought and Muslim Societies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He co-directs Contending Modernities, the global research and education initiative examining the interaction among Catholic, Muslim, and other religious and secular forces in the world. He is a faculty fellow of the Keough School's Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. Moosa's interests span both classical and modern Islamic thought with a special focus on Islamic law, history, ethics and theology. His book What Is a Madrasa? was published in 2015 by the University of North Carolina Press. Moosa also is the author of Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination, winner of the American Academy of Religion’s Best First Book in the History of Religions (2006) and editor of the last manuscript of the late Professor Fazlur Rahman, Revival and Reform in Islam: A Study of Islamic Fundamentalism. Other publications also include the co-edited book The African Renaissance and the Afro-Arab Spring (Georgetown University Press, 2015); Islam in the Modern World (Routledge, 2014), and Muslim Family Law in Sub-Saharan Africa: Colonial Legacies and Post-Colonial Challenges, (Amsterdam University Press, Spring, 2010).
 
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Dania Straughan
 
Senior Program Manager
 
4155 Jenkins Nanovic Halls
574-631-7233
dstraugh@nd.edu

Dania Straughan manages the research and outreach activities of the Contending Modernities research initiative. She organizes conferences and workshops, supports international research and education projects, and develops fundraising proposals and evaluation mechanisms.

Dania is a graduate of the Kroc Institute’s Masters in Peace Studies, where she focused on public policy, monitoring and evaluation, and organizational management. As part of her program she conducted an ethnographic evaluation of a local South Bend organization applying dialogue to intergroup conflict, and benchmarked the use of restorative justice on North American college campuses for the ND Office of Community Standards. She previously served as outreach coordinator at the Millennium Nucleus for the Study of Stateness and Democracy in Latin America, in Santiago, Chile. She has also served as a research assistant at the UN ECLAC.