Ely Orrego Torres
Northwestern University
Bio
Born and raised in Chile, Ely Orrego-Torres is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois). Currently, she is a Visiting PhD student at the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po-Paris. She was a Northwestern Buffett Global Impacts Graduate Fellow, a Social Science Research Council Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellow (SSRC-Fetzer Institute), and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Critical Theory. Previously, she earned a B.A. in Political Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (2011) and an M.A. in Philosophy and Contemporary Thought from Diego Portales University (2018).
Her research agenda intertwines political theory and international relations to address questions on religion and politics in the global context. She uses an interdisciplinary approach that relies on ethnographic methods and critical theories to account for narratives of religious freedom and secularisms in the present historical context. Her dissertation studies the politics of religious freedom and secularism in the Americas by devoting attention to transnational and regional networks, particularly transnational religious networks participating in the Organization of American States (OAS). She is also interested in ecofeminist political theologies and transnational solidarities in Latin America. Her work will soon be published in Social Compass and Philosophy and Global Affairs. She also serves as the coordinator of the research area at the regional NGO on religion and politics, “Otros Cruces”.
Outside academia, she is a foodie and loves exploring new restaurants, cooking new recipes, and trying street food around the world.
See more about her work at: http://elyorregotorres.com