Candace Lukasik

Candace Lukasik is Assistant Professor of Religion and Faculty Affiliate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures at Mississippi State University. Her research explores religion and the transnational politics of violence, migration, race, and indigeneity in the Middle East, specifically Egypt and Iraq, and its US diasporas. 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, Affiliate Faculty Member in the Department of Anthropology at University at Buffalo, and 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. 

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. 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 traces how ecologies of war—in the form of everyday experiences, material effects, and affective resonances of violence—shape religious and political claims of rootedness and stateless sovereignty, and impact upon Christian-Muslim relations locally and globally.

Her scholarship has appeared in American Anthropologist, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Middle East Critique, 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 with The Immanent Frame, Contending Modernities, Berkley Forum, Anthropology News, and The Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, and she sits on the board of Egypt Migrations.