Congrats Class of 2024

Mia Blavatnik is an Art History major and Jewish Studies minor.  Following graduation, she’s planning on either working at a museum next year or attending business school in Europe for a master’s in arts management. Mia hopes to eventually work as a museum manager, ideally combining her interests in art history and Jewish Studies to manage a museum about Judaism.  One of her favorite professors, Michael Berger, shares, “Mia is excited to learn about all things related to Jewish civilization - religion, women, politics, and popular culture - sharpening her gaze on the contemporary scene. We’re sure she’ll be leaving her mark on the Jewish world in the not too distant future!”

Keenan Davis earned his PhD in Religion with a dissertation titled Aspiring to Autonomy: An Ethical Phenomenology of DBS for Depression.  Now that he’s finished his PhD, he has two years left of medical school and, from there, will go on to residency.  Ultimately, his goal is to practice medicine in an academic setting where he can both care for patients and contribute to the developing field of religion and bioethics.  His advisor, Prof. Don Seeman, reflects, “Keenan Davis is only the second MD-PhD student in the history of Emory's Graduate Division of Religion and the first to be affiliated with Jewish Studies.  Keenan's work focused on the analysis of moral themes in the narratives of people who have been treated with deep brain stimulation therapy for severe treatment resistant depression. He shows how religious studies and virtue ethics can help us to better understand the process of renewal and rediscovery of agency that patients and clinicians describe.  I believe that Keenan will go on to quickly publish his first book with a major press and that it will help to change the way we think about these different fields."

Chava Green earned her PhD in Religion with a dissertation titled The Hasidic Face of Feminism: Gender Between Modernity and Mysticism in Chabad-Lubavitch.  After graduation, she’s excited to move to Philadelphia with her family.  There, she’ll seek a lecture position and begin her next book project aimed towards a popular audience-- an exposition of the feminine, as an embodied practice, in the Lubavitcher Rebbe's teachings based on the models of biblical female figures.  Her advisor, Prof. Don Seeman, shares, “When Chava Green’s scholarship goes public, it will substantially change the academic discourse on women in Hasidism. I know of no other work that combines ethnographic insight, serious attention to theology, and focus on what contemporary Chabad women have to say for themselves. Some of the results are surprising.”

Lyndsey Lipson is a Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology major and Jewish Studies minor. Immediately after graduation, she will stay in Atlanta to continue working in a neuroscience lab.  Long-term, she aspires to apply to PhD programs in Neuroscience and work for a small biotech company on drug development for neurological diseases. Her Hebrew instructor, Pazit Kahlon-Shelnutt, says, “Lyndsey’s deep engagement with the Israeli and Jewish culture was demonstrated inside and outside of the classroom. I am so proud of her initiatives to develop a respectful discourse while at the same time strengthening Jewish identity among students in the classroom and on campus. Lyndsey is a born leader who I am sure will take the tools she acquired at Emory and lead any community she reaches.”