Candace Lukasik is an assistant professor of Religion and faculty affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. Her research focuses on the transnational politics of migration, violence, and indigeneity in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Iraq, and its US diasporas. She is currently an AAUW American Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellow and Affiliate Faculty Member in the Department of Anthropology at University at Buffalo. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020.
Her first book, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (NYU Press, forthcoming March 2025) examines how American theopolitical imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom in migration. By thinking with Coptic Orthodox Christians, Martyrs and Migrants broadly reveals how transnational translations of spiritual kinship are forged through theological histories of martyrdom and of blood, demonstrating the global dynamics and imperial politics of contemporary Christianity.
Drawing on continuing fieldwork with Assyrians in Detroit and northern Iraq, her second book project, Somewhere Else: Political Ecologies and Indigenous Sovereignty in Global Assyria will trace the transnational formations of indigenous movements in the aftermath of the US occupation and ISIS/Daesh. In their claims to indigeneity and demand for reparation, Assyrians have formed international solidarity networks with indigenous peoples in North America to emphasize their sovereignty and to cement their kin. These decolonial narratives of community come to frame diasporic humanitarian efforts and aid strategies that oscillate between the American Christian gaze and Assyrian indigeneity.
Her research and teaching has received support from the American Academy of Religion, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs, the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, the Louisville Institute, the Wabash Center, the Fetzer Institute, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University, among others.
Her scholarship has appeared in American Anthropologist, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, Middle East Critique, the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies and edited volumes with UNC Press and Rutgers University Press, among others. In addition to academic scholarship, she has published opinion editorials and short-form essays in The Immanent Frame, Contending Modernities, Berkley Forum, Anthropology News, Public Orthodoxy, and The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, and she sits on the board of Egypt Migrations. She currently serves on the steering committees for the Middle Eastern Christianity, Anthropology of Religion, and Religion and Politics units of the American Academy of Religion and is a Member-at-Large in the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. You can find her full CV here.