ISM welcomes new long-term fellows

Marcel Camprubí is a musicologist specializing in Arabic music theory in the medieval Middle East and al-Andalus. His research examines the history of music theory, historical notations, and cross-cultural histories of medieval music.

At the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Camprubí is developing a project on monasteries in the medieval Middle East (eighth to tenth centuries) as sites of musical encounter between Christians and Muslims, examining how they functioned simultaneously as spaces of interreligious contact and sonic boundary-making.

Before joining Yale, he was Frances A. Yates Postdoctoral Fellow at the Warburg Institute, London, and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg with support from the DAAD. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2024.

Elyan Jeanine Hill is an interdisciplinary scholar of African arts. Her research interests include festival arts, religious materiality, Black feminisms, and embodied renderings of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades in Ghana, Togo, Liberia, Haiti, and their diasporas. Her first book, Spirited Choreographies: Ritual, Sacred Art, and History-Making (under contract with Duke University Press), engages with narratives of migration featured in ritual performances and festival events by Ewe communities in coastal regions of Ghana and Togo. To understand these fraught narratives of forced and free regional dispersal, the book traces practices honoring water spirits and a pantheon of slave spirits called Mama Tchamba, or “grandmother slave.” The book frames the body as an altar, a living archive of accumulated objects and adornments. These lavish embodiments illustrate the interplay of performers’ identities with the objects and images through which religious communities fashion transoceanic and interethnic dialogues.

 At Yale, Hill will develop a second project that redefines Atlantic African women’s masquerade based on partial concealment, diasporic practice, and ritual adornment. This new project compares Ewe bodily inscriptions used in festival performances to the work of Brooklyn-based Haitian artist Fabiola Jean-Louis in her photo series Rewriting History. Hill’s written work has been featured in African Arts, Africa, Art Journal, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, and in the edited volume Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas. She has received fellowships and grants from the Fowler Museum, the West African Research Association (WARA), the Africana Research Center at Penn State, the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Women’s Studies and Religion Program at Harvard University. She is currently assistant professor of African and African diaspora art history at Southern Methodist University.

Constantine Lignos is a scholar of religion and performance who studies a remarkable and largely unexplored archive: tantric dance texts (cham yik) produced by Tibetan Buddhist scholars from the 13th century to the present. These texts reveal that Tibetan Buddhism produced a rich tradition of performance theory, a discursive arena in which scholars theorized religious subjectivity, the role of aesthetics in ritual performance, and even whether performance can be captured in text at all. Because these texts insist on live relational transmission, Constantine supplements his historical and textual analysis with embodied learning, training with monastic dancers in India and the United States. As a Fellow at the Yale ISM, Constantine will be developing a book manuscript based on his dissertation, “Dancing Tantra: Body, Text, and Performance in Tibetan Tantric Buddhism,” which takes Tibetan Buddhist performance theory seriously as a sustained intellectual tradition that grapples with how ritual and aesthetic practices create and dissolve a sacred world, and unmake and remake the self.

Constantine received his Ph.D. on the East Asian Religions track of the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Columbia University. He holds an M.A. in East Asian Studies from Columbia University, and an M.A. in Performance Studies and B.F.A. in Drama and Dramatic Writing, both from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. For more information about his research and teaching, visit www.constantinelignos.phd.

Michele Scarlassara received his Ph.D. in Asian and North African Studies from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Prior to joining Yale, he was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

His research explores the intersections of Christianity, Judaism, and other religious traditions in Late Antiquity, with particular attention to the interplay between liturgy, material culture, and ritual practice (e.g., amulets and incantation bowls). He has published articles in leading journals in the field, including Journal of Aramaic Studies and Studies in Late Antiquity. In 2023, he received the “Anna De Sio” prize for excellence in the historical study of religions.

While at the ISM, he will work on his monograph, Servants of God and Mammon: Magic and the Making of Christian Liturgy in Late Antiquity. The project explores the fourth to seventh centuries, a period widely recognized as a crucial formative phase in the development of Christian liturgical practice, through the lens of so-called “magical” sources. Although the emergence, development, and performance of core liturgical rites such as baptism, the Eucharist, and anointing of the sick are only partially understood, this body of sources offers an invaluable window onto these processes. Drawing on a wide range of texts and material objects from Christian Egypt and Syria-Mesopotamia—including amulets, prayers, ostraca, and ritual handbooks—as well as normative and narrative sources such as hagiography, homilies, and ecclesiastical canons, the project demonstrates the close entanglement of liturgy and ritual power in Late Antiquity and shows how these materials are key to reconstructing this creative phase in the history of Christian liturgical discourse.