The Life Worth Living Network offers fellowships to encourage undergraduate education on enduring questions about the shape of flourishing life. We connect faculty and graduate students who seek to design and facilitate courses that equip students for the lifelong process of discerning the good life. Together, we envision an educational landscape in which students and faculty learn alongside each other how to ask and respond to life’s biggest questions.

We're delighted to introduce and highlight our 2023 Graduate Student Pedagogy Fellowship recipients.

To learn more and apply for our 2024 cohort, click here.

The Life Worth Living Network is administered through the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and is supported by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

‍

Graduate Fellows

‍

‍

Olusola (Shola) Adegbite

Union Theological Seminary

I am a Yoruba-African Biblical Studies scholar (in the making) with a mission to encourage and empower people to live wholesome lives in which their mind, body, soul, and spirit are aligned using resources from religious, cultural and philosophical traditions ancient and contemporary. My blog ideservetrog.com is only a first step.

‍

‍

Eno Agolli

Rutgers University

Eno Agolli is a PhD student in Philosophy at Rutgers University. He has a BA in philosophy from the University of Chicago. He has completed graduate degrees and research in philosophy at Cambridge (UK), UConn, and Notre Dame. He is an analytic philosopher, specializing in language and logic but interested in all of philosophy. He writes poetry, cooks, and tries to program.

‍

‍

‍

Jason Barton

University of New Mexico

Jason Barton is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. His research focuses on the interaction between German Idealism (in particular: G.W.F. Hegel and F.W.J. Schelling) and the philosophy of religion. His dissertation -- "A Hegelian Theory of Divine Revelation" -- seeks to derive an account of divine revelation from Hegel's much-overlooked and much-neglected "Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion," namely the second volume on "Determinate Religion.”

‍

‍

Patrick Brooks

Rutgers University

My name is Patrick Brooks, and I’m a philosophy PhD candidate at Rutgers University. I’ve taught courses in logic, epistemology, and film and philosophy. My primary research areas are social and political philosophy, political epistemology, and the philosophy of conspiracy theories.

‍

‍

‍

Kjersten (Kurty) Darling

Luther Seminary

Kjersten is a practical theologian studying Evangelical visions of a flourishing life at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota. She teaches humanities and theological studies at Bethel University. A proud resident of Minneapolis, she spends her free time admiring the flowers in her garden, playing pickup team sports, and escaping the city with her family and camper any chance she can get.

‍

‍

Alana Felton

Yale University

Alana Felton is a PhD Candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University writing a dissertation on contemporary Belarusian culture. She also works as a writing tutor to Yale undergraduates. In 2018-19, she was a Fulbright ETA in Viciebsk, Belarus after graduating with a BA in Slavic Studies from Brown University. In her free time, she enjoys hiking with her dog, birding, taking barre classes, and hanging out with her husband and cats.

‍

‍

Elias Hage

Columbia University

Elias Hage is a Ph.D. student in Philosophy and Education at Columbia University. He specializes in phenomenology, 19th and 20th-century philosophy, and human nature. He’s currently interested in questions pertaining to the experience of self-formation and the function of mimesis in learning. Elias has a Master of Arts in Religious Education from Fordham University and a Research Master in Philosophy with a concentration in phenomenology from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

‍

‍

Theresa Kauder

Yale University

Theresa Naomi Kauder is a PhD Candidate in German and Film & Media Studies at Yale. Her research focuses on the intersection of Critical Theory, German Literature, Visual Art, and Film Theory & History. Her dissertation examines figurations of (post-)romanticism from a film and media studies perspective. Theresa holds a B.A. in Art History and an M.A. in Cultural History and Theory (Kulturwissenschaft) from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She wrote her master’s thesis on the later works of Michel Foucault. She published papers on contemporary literature and gender theory (such as on Hélène Cixous’s oneiric writing).

‍

Olena Kushyna

University of Pardubice

Olena Kushyna is a Ukrainian PhD student at the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. She has three degrees in philosophy: BA (Ukraine) and two Master’s (Ukraine and Estonia). Her background is diverse: continental philosophy, analytic philosophy of mind, and Indian and Ukrainian philosophies. Her current research on natality combines three optics: feminism, queer critique, and non-anthropocentrism. Her philosophical practice includes teaching, yoga, animal care, and cultivating sisterhood.

‍

‍

Robin Landrith

Boston College

Robin Landrith is a sixth-year doctoral candidate at Boston College. She writes on medieval mysticism, moral theory, and hermeneutics, focusing especially on Richard of St. Victor and Hadewijch of Brabant and the role of metaphor and metaphysics in their trinitarian theologies. She is a two-time recipient of the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy Doctoral Fellowship and a recipient of the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award at Boston College.

‍

‍

Jiyoung Lee

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Jiyoung Lee is a doctoral student of the Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has been studying about Philosophy of Education and working as an Editorial Assistant for Professor Nicholas Burbules at the Journal of Educational Theory.

Originally from Seoul, South Korea, she studied moral and ethics education at Ewha Womans University. Her research interests are educational meaning of suffering and the relationship between human suffering and flourishing.

‍

Yejin (Sally) Lee

Georgia State University

Yejin (Sally) Lee is a doctoral student in the Counseling Psychology program at Georgia State University. Her research interests lie in the area of positive psychology (e.g., gratitude and humility) and the psychology of religion/spirituality. Sally is interested in the ways that she can bring the Life Worth Living approach both to students and clients as fellow journeyers through life, with an emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism.

‍

‍

David Leonhardt

Duke Graduate School

David is a PhD Candidate in Religion at Duke Graduate School. His research focus is on the influence of Judaism on early Christian texts. His dissertation is on the development of Jewish and Christians identities and a reinterpretation of the parting of the ways in the Gospel of John. In addition, David enjoys teaching and implementing strategies in the classroom to make content relevant and accessible to all students and their respective learning styles.

‍

‍

Ahmed Nur

Yale University

Ahmed Tahir Nur is a student of intellectual and cultural history in West Asia and the Mediterranean World. Broadly interested in the conceptions and transmissions of knowledge and authority across regions and traditions, his current dissertation research at Yale Religious Studies explores the developments in the genre of classification of the sciences in Islam, with particular emphasis on epistemology and metaphysics, highlighting the contribution of the Ottoman scholar Ahmed Tashkoprizade (1495-1561).

‍

‍

Christie Pavey

Royal Holloway, University of London

Christie Pavey is currently finishing a PhD in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, as part of the CONNEC project (“Connected Clerics: Building a Universal Church in the Late Antique West (380-640 CE)”). Her dissertation focuses on bishops and their communities within the institution of the church in late Roman Africa, under the bishoprics of Augustine and Aurelius.

‍

‍

Jake Rohde

Yale University

Jake joined the departments of Philosophy and Classics at Yale University in 2017 after completing a BA at UNC-Chapel Hill in Philosophy and Classics. He is a specialist in classical Greek and Roman philosophy currently writing a dissertation on the metaphysics of process in Aristotle. He is also interested in the reception of Aristotle in the Platonic tradition, especially the philosophy of Plotinus. Outside of philosophy he enjoys poetry and black metal.

‍

‍