Candace Lukasik is an anthropologist and a Yang Visiting Scholar in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. She is the Democracy Innovation Lab Anthropologist at Keseb. Candace’s expertise lies in how minority and diaspora communities claim political belonging across borders. Her research focuses on the politics of violence and migration in Egypt and Iraq and their U.S. diasporas. Her first book, Martyrs and Migrants (NYU Press, 2025), shows how American campaigns around the global persecution of Christians have reshaped Coptic migrants’ memory of their community’s history. Her current project, Country Roads to Beth Nahrain, follows Assyrian communities in Detroit and northern Iraq to trace how war shapes a stateless people’s claims to land and self-determination.
Candace received the 2025 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies for Martyrs and Migrants and has held fellowships at Brandeis University and Washington University in St. Louis. She is also co-editor of Anthropologies of Orthodox Christianity (Fordham University Press, 2025) and co-author of Orthodox Christianity in America (Routledge, 2027). Her work and writing have been featured in The Conversation, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, Anthropology News, and WGVU Public Media, among others.
Candace serves as Treasurer of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and co-chairs the Religion and Politics unit of the American Academy of Religion. She earned her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.