REL Announces a New Hire

Picture 10The Department of Religious Studies is very pleased to announce that it has now finalized another new hire: Vaia Touna, who works on ancient and modern Greek identity, as examples of wider issues in identity studies, will begin as a tenure-track Assistant Professor, in August 2015.

Vaia is currently completing her dissertation in the academic study of religion at the University of Alberta, entitled “The Politics of ‘Greek Identity’: Discourses on the Religious Self and Tradition”; she has also earned degrees in the study of religion at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. She assisted with REL’s past study abroad courses in Greece, worked in the Department for a semester in 2010 (as part of the College of Arts & Sciences’ Greece Initiative),and will bring to REL a wealth of new language and primary source expertise, focused on the ancient Greek/Hellenistic period.

Complementing the research emphases of other REL faculty, she will offer courses that use social theory to situate the ancient data as examples of wider processes also taking place in a variety of other cultural and historical settings.

With this new hire the Department’s full-time tenure-track and tenured faculty will now number 9 — twice as large as the Department was in 2001 and the largest it has been since its founding in the mid- to late-1960s.