Matthew Drew
Matthew Drew is a doctoral student in Religious Studies at Northwestern University studying under Professor Sarah Jacoby. He is interested in questions of state formation, secularity, and subjectivity with a specific focus on how Tibetan monasteries shaped Tibetans’ economic, judicial, and social lives in the first half of the 20th century. By examining how various functions of monasteries were contested and reorganized, he hopes to elucidate competing Tibetan modes of ordering (what we might otherwise call) religion and the state. His other interests include affect theory and embodiment, and the automation of the cataloguing and analysis of scholarly materials. He received a B.A in Religious Studies and Psychology from Washington University in St. Louis in 2017, and an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia in 2021.