Kevin M. Burton is Assistant Professor of Church History at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary and the Director of the Center for Adventist Research at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan. His work focuses on the relationship between minority religions and evangelicalism in the antebellum United States, particularly in reference to politics, race, and gender. One of his recent publications, “Adventists and the Military,” appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Seventh-day Adventism (2024). His first book, tentatively titled, Apocalyptic Abolitionism: How Immediate Millennialists Helped Abolish Slavery and Reform America, is under contract with New York University Press for their North American Religions series. This work explores how catastrophic apocalypticism harmonized with social reform and liberal political engagement during the rise of American democracy. In 2023, he completed his Ph.D. in American Religious History at Florida State University where he also received the Porterfield Prize and defended his dissertation with distinction.

Samah Choudhury is Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer with the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago where she teaches courses on religion, racialization, literature, and visual cultures. Samah is at work on her first book, American Muslim and the Politics of Secularity, which asks how a “sense of humor” came to be a prized trait of the modern secular subject and why present-day Muslims are consistently configured as lacking this comportment. Through a study of the American Muslim standup comedians, she contends that Muslim legibility depends on situating Islam and within the logics of model secular subjecthood and the register of race. Her work has been supported by the Asian American Religions Research Initiative, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, the UNC Chapel Hill Asian American Center, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. She previously taught at Ithaca College and earned her PhD in Islamic Studies from UNC Chapel Hill in 2020.

Aaron Griffith is Assistant Professor of American Church History at Duke Divinity School. His work focuses on evangelicalism, religion and American politics, and religion and criminal justice. His first book, God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America, was published in 2020 by Harvard University Press. He is currently at work on a book on the religious history of American policing. Griffith has been a postdoctoral fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and a public fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute. He is the recipient of the 2021 Emerging Public Intellectual Award, hosted by Redeemer University, and a Louisville Institute Project Grant. He has published articles in Religions and Fides et Historia and writes for popular audiences in publications such as TIME and Christianity Today.

Matthew Harris is Assistant Professor of Religions in the Americas at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His research and teaching interests are broad, but center on African American religion, Black radical traditions, and the politics of culture. He is at work on his first book, Black Religion Under the Sign of Saturn, which is a religious history of how outer space became the place of Black freedom dreams in the twentieth century.

Adeana McNicholl is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is a scholar of Buddhism in premodern South Asia and in the United States. Her first book, Of Ancestors and Ghosts (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines the early history of Buddhist ghost stories, showing how the reincarnated “hungry” ghost helped constitute hierarchies of human bodily difference in relation to class, caste, gender, and sexuality. Her current book project, tentatively titled Black Buddhism: A Religious History of Afro-Asian Solidarity, illustrates the importance of Buddhism for the conceptualization of Blackness within transnational anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-caste movements. This work traces a longer history in which Black people looked to Buddhism to resignify Blackness, repudiate the racial logics of Orientalism, and construct an alternate modernity that, while intersecting with other forms of Buddhist modernism, offers a politically distinct discourse that cannot be articulated separately from American racial politics.

Carolina Ortega is Assistant Professor of History and Latino Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is a historian of migration, labor, religion, and Latinxs in the modern United States and Mexico. Her current book project, The Sending State: How the Mexican State of Guanajuato Shaped Twentieth Century U.S. Migration, is a multi-sided history that traces guanajuatense migration to the United States across the twentieth century, forcing us to recalibrate our understanding of the sustained cycles of Mexican migration by examining migratory journeys that have rarely been the object of scholarly study or popular discourse. Through a detailed examination of a century’s worth of Mexican migration from the state of Guanajuato, her book re-envisions the deep, fluid, and often ignored forces that tie U.S. and Mexican history. She argues that to understand Mexican migrants’ placemaking in the United States, we must also look to the migrants’ communities of origin.

Sarah Riccardi-Swartz is Assistant Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Northeastern University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she is trained as a historian, ethnographer, and filmmaker of American religion. She is the author of Between Heaven and Russia: Religious Conversion and Political Apostasy in Appalachia (Fordham University Press, 2022). She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively entitled, Digital Dissidents: Science, Technology, and Orthodoxy in Far-Right Media Worlds. Her work has been supported by the NEH via Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Louisville Institute, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, and the Social Science Research Council, among other organizations.

Andrew Walker-Cornetta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and at the Center for Leadership in Disability. His research explores cultural locations of disability as sites of religious practice and he is currently working on a book project about US Catholics and cognitive impairment in the middle of the twentieth century. Prior to joining the faculty at GSU, he held a postdoctoral appointment at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and is currently a member of the Being Human Emerging Scholars Program at Indiana University Bloomington.

Kayla Renée Wheeler is Assistant Professor of Critical Ethnic Studies and Theology and the Africana Studies Program Director at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. Dr. Wheeler is an expert in Black Islam, Islamic bioethics, and material religion. Currently, she is writing a book entitled, Fashioning Black Islam: Race, Gender, and Belonging in the American Ummah, which provides a history of Black Muslim fashion in the United States from the 1930s to the present. She is the author of the digital humanities project, Mapping Malcolm’s Boston, which explores Malcolm X’s life in Boston from the 1940s to 1950s. Dr. Wheeler is also the curator of the award-winning Black Islam Syllabus.

2024-2026 Mentors

R. Marie Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. She served for 12 years (2011-2023) as the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics and the editor of the Center’s journal, Religion & Politics. Her research focuses on American Christianity, including the changing profile of American evangelicals and ongoing conflicts over gender, sexuality, and marriage. Dr. Griffith is the author or editor of seven books. Her latest book, Making the World Over: Confronting Racism, Misogyny, and Xenophobia in U.S. History (UVA Press, 2021), urges a re-reading of the nation’s history that opens up greater complexity than our stock narratives.

Kristy Nabhan-Warren is Associate Vice President of Research and V.O. and Elizabeth Kahl Figge Chair in Catholic Studies at the University of Iowa. Dr. Nabhan-Warren is passionate about teaching and research and finds both vocations to be mutually informing and inspiring. In both the classroom and in her scholarly work, she focuses on the lived, daily experiences of American Christians and their communities. Her newest book is Meatpacking America: How Migration, Work and Faith Unite and Divide the Heartland (UNC Press, September 2021). Based on seven years of fieldwork in rural Iowa, Meatpacking America is a finely grained ethnography as well as historically situated study of lived religion in the hog and corn producing state of Iowa.

Maggie Elmore is Assistant Professor of US Latina/o history at Sam Houston State University. A historian of the 20th century United States, her teaching and research focus on immigration, religion and politics, and human rights in the 20^th century United States. Maggie is the co-editor of Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics Since 1945 (NYU Press, 2022). Her current book manuscript, Unholy Border: How the United States used the Catholic Church to Control Its Southern Border, is a study of 20^th century religious politics and migration. Her work has also appeared in US Catholic Historian and the Southwestern Historical Quarterly. In addition, she currently serves as the Vice-President and President-Elect of the Texas Catholic Historical Society. Maggie holds a BA in history from Texas Tech University, and a PhD in United States History from the University of California, Berkeley.

Seth Emmanuel Gaiters is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and Africana Studies at University of North Carolina-Wilmington. He is a scholar of African American religious studies, with particular interest in the exploration of religion and race through Black progressive social movements and cultures in America. His interdisciplinary research and teaching trajectory engages the intersection of African American religious thought, political theology, race, African American literature, and critical theory. He is currently completing his book manuscript, tentatively entitled, #BlackLivesMatter and Religion in the Street: A Revival of the Sacred in the Public Sphere. In this project he brings his interests to a study of #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) as a way of broadening normative notions of (Black) religiosity and elucidating the synchronicity of spirituality and social justice in Black political organizing. He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Louisville Institute, Forum for Theological Exploration, and Social Science Research Council. 

Lucia Hulsether is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College. She has broad interests in religion, culture, and politics in the Americas, with primary intellectual commitments to feminist/queer theory, critical race and ethnic studies, and the histories of social movements. Her first book, Capitalist Humanitarianism (Duke University Press, 2023) explores the historical interplay between twentieth century left/socialist organizing and neoliberal projects to make free markets “ethical” with respect to the racialized and feminized populations that they dispossess. Her current projects analyze the construction of truth-claims and the production of cultural identities within U.S. educational institutions. With Tina Pippin (Agnes Scott College), Lucia co-hosts the podcast Nothing Never Happens, which features conversations with teachers, organizers, and scholars on the cutting edge of radical pedagogy. 

Brennan Keegan is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Environmental and Sustainability Studies at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC where she teaches courses on American religious history, Native American religious traditions, and religion and the environment. Her work appears in places such as the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion Compass, and Religion & American Culture. Her first book project, No Eden: Religion and Labor in the American West, explores how Northern Arapahos, Irish Catholic immigrants, and Latter-day Saints resisted the isolating conditions of empire in the nineteenth century American West. Her current work continues to explore the spatial consequences of settler colonialism and Native space-making practices, both in the American West and the American South. She is the Vice-President of the American Academy of Religion, South East Region and received her PhD from Duke University.

Nancy A. Khalil is an Assistant Professor in American Culture, and Core Faculty in the Program on Arab and Muslim American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include Muslims, ethnography, religion, racialization, and advertising. Her current book project forthcoming with Stanford University Press is an ethnographic research project on Islamic higher education institutes and religious clerics, or imams, in the United States. In it she explores how bureaucratic policies, such as visa offerings and approval, and state-led higher education degree-granting authority, can shape how decentralized religions regulate, credential, and recognize their religious leaders and institutions in the United States. Dr. Khalil received her PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2017 and completed afterwards a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University’s Center for Race Indigeneity and Transnational Migration as well as the Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan. She previously worked as a Muslim Chaplain at Wellesley College, co-founded the Muslim Justice League, and served on the Board of Trustees for the Islamic Relief USA. She currently serves on the board for Pillars Foundation.

Suzanna Krivulskaya is Assistant Professor of History at California State University San Marcos, where she teaches courses in religion, gender, sexuality, and digital history. She specializes in modern U.S. history and studies the relationship between sexuality and religion. Her first book, Disgraced: How Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism, is a sweeping religious and cultural history of Protestant sex scandals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Krivulskaya is the recipient of the 2019-2020 Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Award from the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network and the 2022-2023 Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) Fellow in Religion and LGBTQ Rights. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and popular outlets like the Revealer, Religion News Service, and Religion & Politics. 

K. Elise Leal is Assistant Professor of History at Whitworth University, where she teaches courses on early America, women and gender, and religious history. Her research focuses on intersections of religion, gender, and life stage in 19^th-century America. Her first book, tentatively titled Holy Nurseries: Sunday Schools and the Creation of Childhood in Early American Christianity, positions children as primary actors within the rise of Sunday schools from 1790 to 1860, arguing that these new child-centric spaces empowered young people to shape the formation of American religious culture while simultaneously creating a social imaginary for childhood itself in ways that continue to influence contemporary life. Her work has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the 2017 Sidney Mead Prize from the American Society of Church History and the 2022 Lapides Fellowship in Pre-1865 Juvenile Literature and Ephemera from the American Antiquarian Society. Her second book project will use age as a category of analysis to explore singleness within 19^th-century Protestantism, analyzing the various agential roles unmarried women played across different life stages within and beyond the church. She earned a PhD in History from Baylor University in 2018.  

Dana Logan is a scholar of American religion and ritual who works on the history of evangelicalism, civil society in the nineteenth-century United States, and the experience of ritual in everyday life. She is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at UNC Greensboro. Her first book is Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America. Most recently she has been researching Baptist discipline in the antebellum South. She is interested in the relationship between spiritual discipline and policing in American history.

Charles McCrary is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Eckerd College in Saint Petersburg, Florida. His teaching and research agenda focus on secularism, religious freedom, race, and politics. He is the author of Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press, 2022). His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and Religion & American Culture, as well as popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic. He serves as the book review editor for the journal American Religion. Before coming to Eckerd in 2023, McCrary was a postdoctoral research scholar at the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University and, before that, was a postdoctoral research associate at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

2023-2025 Mentors

Jonathan Ebel has been teaching at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for seventeen years and currently serves as head of the Department of Religion. His research program involves religion and war, religion and violence, and lay theologies of economic hardship all within the American context. He is the author of From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California (New York University Press, 2023); G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (Yale, 2015); Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War  (Princeton, 2010), and the co-editor with Professor John Carlson of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (California, 2012). He is currently at work on a religious history of American warfare, told in five weapons. Jon is a past recipient of a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and a former candidate for U.S. Congress. He is currently the president of the American Society of Church History.

Khyati Y. Joshi is a public intellectual whose social science research and community connections inform educators, thought leaders, and everyday people about race, religion, and immigration in 21st century America. She has lectured around the world and published ground-breaking scholarly and popular work, while also serving as an advisor to policy-makers and a leader in the South Asian American community. Her most recent book, White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America (NYU Press, 2020), examines the intersections of race and religion in U.S. history and contemporary social culture. She was also author and co-editor of Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice 3rd edition  (Routledge, 2015), one of the most widely-used books by diversity practitioners and social justice scholars alike. Dr. Joshi is a Professor of Education at Fairleigh Dickinson University where she was recognized with the FDU Distinguished Faculty Award for Research and Scholarship in 2014. She is member and past Co-Chair (2008-2011) of the managing board for the Asian Pacific American Religion Research Initiative (APARRI), and serves as co-Principal Investigator on APARRI’s project to support emerging scholars and promote greater public engagement on the religious realities of Asian and Pacific Islander Americans, supported by a $1 million grant from the Luce Foundation.