Candace Lukasik is an anthropologist of religion and the Yang Visiting Scholar in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. Her research explores the transnational politics of violence, migration, race, and indigeneity in Egypt and Iraq and their US diasporas. Her first book, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire (NYU Press, 2025), examines how American theopolitical imaginaries of global Christian persecution have remapped Coptic collective memory of martyrdom in migration. It won the 2025 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies, sponsored by the Moise Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies.
Her second book project, Somewhere Else: Political Ecologies and Indigenous Sovereignty in Global Assyria, draws on continuing fieldwork with Assyrians in Detroit and northern Iraq. It traces how ecologies of war—the everyday experiences, material effects, and affective resonances of violence—shape religious and political claims of rootedness and stateless sovereignty, and how they reshape Christian-Muslim relations locally and globally.
She is also co-editor of Anthropologies of Orthodox Christianity: Theology, Politics, Ethics (Fordham University Press, 2025) and co-author of Orthodox Christianity in America: An Introduction (Routledge, 2027). Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in American Anthropologist, Public Culture, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, Middle East Critique, Religion and Society, Exchange: Journal of Contemporary Christianities in Context, the Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, and the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, as well as edited volumes with UNC Press and Rutgers University Press.
Beyond academic publishing, she has written for The Conversation, The Immanent Frame, Contending Modernities, Berkley Forum, Anthropology News, and The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy. Her work has been featured on WGVU Public Media, an NPR and PBS affiliate.
She was previously a Faculty Leave Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, an AAUW American Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellow, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. At the American Academy of Religion, she co-chairs the Religion and Politics unit and sits on the steering committees of the Middle Eastern Christianity and Anthropology of Religion units. She is also Treasurer of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. Her full CV is available here.