Fellow
Laura Alexander
Associate Fellow
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Laura Alexander is a Doctoral Student in Religious Ethics in the University of Virginia Department of Religious Studies. She was raised in Monroe, Louisiana and attended high school in Ruston, Louisiana. Laura earned a B.A. from the University of Chicago, majoring in Religious Studies and graduating with honors. After spending a year teaching English at an elementary school in Ratchaburi, Thailand, through a volunteer program with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and a further year as a volunteer caseworker and immigration specialist for the Refugee Services division of Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, she returned to the University of Chicago to receive a Master of Divinity degree from the Divinity School. She has worked as a researcher for the ELCA Church in Society Program Unit and for the Lutheran Society for Missiology.
Within the field of religious ethics, Laura specializes in Christian ethics, with a particular interest in international issues and migration. Her research interests include Christian thinking about refugees and forced migration; questions of national sovereignty and state borders in a globalizing world; contemporary Christian thought about human rights and the international common good; and both secular and Christian cosmopolitanism. Current and ongoing interlocutors include Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, David Hollenbach, Luke Bretherton, and Seyla Benhabib.
Who We Are
The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture is an interdisciplinary research center and intellectual community at the University of Virginia committed to understanding contemporary cultural change and its individual and social consequences, training young scholars, and providing intellectual leadership in service to the public good.
