EUGENE, Ore. -- (April 14, 2010) -- University of Oregon political scientist Karrie Koesel is among 16 individual scholars worldwide chosen to study the rapid rise of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in 23 countries. The Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California recently announced grants totaling $3.5 million.

Koesel will receive $99,935 for a two-year project that begins in late May. She was among 500 applicants for individual funding in the program, which also benefitted five regional research centers. Other researchers also will explore these religious movements in Asia, Africa, Latin America, or the former Soviet Union. The initiative is supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Regional center grants are up to $500,000 for two years, while individual grants don't exceed $100,000.

Koesel, with assistance from two graduate-level and two undergraduate research assistants, will compare Russian and Chinese versions of these two movements, which have been growing despite state restrictions on religious activities since the fall of the Soviet Union. Koesel will spend this summer and fall in Shanghai and Changchun, China. In summer and fall 2011, she will pursue her project in Russia (Nizhny Novgorod, St. Petersburg and Tatarstan).

Koesel joined the UO faculty in 2009. She studied religious revivals in the two countries for her dissertation at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., en route to a doctoral degree in political science.