Eden Consenstein is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and the Mary Noel and William M. Lamont Fellow in Religion, Media, and Technology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is a historian of Christianity in the United States, with particular interests in mass media, capitalism, and conservative politics. Her current book project, Religion at Time Inc.: From the Beginning of Time to the End of Life, is a history of religion at Time Incorporated, the major twentieth-century media corporation best known for TIME and Life magazines. Her second book project, tentatively titled Pyramids of Plenty: Christianity and Multi-Level Marketing, will trace connections between U.S. American conservative Christianity and the multi-level marketing industry. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, The New-York Historical Society, The Eisenhower Presidential Library, and UNC’s Institute for Arts and Humanities.

Isaiah Ellis is Assistant Professor of Urban Religions in the Religious Studies Department at Southern Methodist University and a faculty affiliate in SMU’s Urban Research Cluster. His research examines the mutually transformative relationships between the built environment and religious life in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, and the implications of these histories for how religion scholars understand the relationship between space, place, and power. His in-progress book, Apostles of Asphalt: The Religious Politics of Roadbuilding in the American South, explores how religious narrations of Manifest Destiny and post-Civil War southern redemption shaped the movement to build America’s first modernized highways. Prior to joining the faculty at SMU, he held a Robert M. Kingdon Fellowship at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at University of Wisconsin-Madison and an Arts & Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto.

Laura M. Krull is Assistant Professor of Sociology at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. Her research investigates how Christian congregations in the United States reproduce or challenge inequality, focusing on how pastors address social and political controversies in their sermons. Her current projects include two studies investigating how pastors respond to significant national events. In one, she analyzes how pastors across the U.S. use religious frameworks to make sense of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the other, she examines how pastors in Wisconsin talk about the 2024 election, including any discussion of voting, the two candidates, and the political climate more broadly. She enjoys working with undergraduate research assistants on these projects and incorporating methodological and empirical lessons from her research into her courses.

Wendy Mallette is Assistant Professor of Contemporary American Christianities at the University of Oklahoma. Her first book, Lesbian Feminist Killjoys: Sin, Pessimism, and Queer Histories (under contract with NYU Press), draws on the archives of lesbian feminist public cultures of the 1960s through 1980s to intervene in conversations around negativity, sin, and affect in queer studies and religious studies. Her next book project examines music, art, and poetry created by lesbians in the mid-twentieth century to respond to expressions of homophobia, white supremacy, antisemitism, and misogyny by conservative Christian women. She was a Research Associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School during the 2024–2025 academic year.

Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha is an Assistant Professor of African Diasporic Religious Thought and Traditions in the Department of Religion at Rice University. She previously held a position as an Assistant Professor of Africana Religions at the University of Miami and as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. Nwokocha is a scholar of Africana religions with expertise in the ethnographic study of Vodou in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora. Her research is grounded in gender and sexuality studies, visual and material culture and Africana Studies. She is the author of Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), an ethnographic study of fashion, spirit possession, and gender and sexuality in contemporary Haitian Vodou, exploring Black religious communities through their innovative ceremonial practices. The book is featured within the series Where Religion Lives.

Miray Philips is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her work focuses on the transnational politics, meaning, and memory of violence and suffering in the Middle East and its diasporas. Her current book project, Persecution Politics, explores conflictual representations of religious difference, specifically the plight of Middle East Christians, in the global context of the war on terror. She is also co-editing an edited volume on innovative methods in Coptic studies with Mina Ibrahim. Her other collaborative projects investigate knowledge production and collective memories of mass violence, specifically in Syria. Her research is published in scholarly journals such as the Sociology of Religion, Law & Society Review, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Memory Studies, and the Minnesota Journal of International Law. Miray also sits on the Board of Advisors of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

Cara Rock-Singer is Lama Shetzer Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she is also affiliated with the Gender and Women’s Studies Department and the Science and Technology Studies Program. Her book manuscript, Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press in the Class 200 series.

Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Loyola University Chicago. He is an historian of religion and ritual, whose research focuses on Indigenous traditions of Mesoamerica in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His work has been published in the journals Religion and Material Religion. His first monograph, Give Drink to the Sun: Life as a Nahua Ritual Specialist (under contract with University of Arizona Press), details the journeys of two specialists at the time of the Conquest, establishing how societal, human, and more-than-human agents weaved the meaning of collecting and offering. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Newberry Library, the American Academy of Religion, and various university-sponsored fellowships and grants.

Joseph Stuart is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University, specializing in African American history and religious studies. His work examines how race, masculinity, and civil rights shaped twentieth-century Black Freedom Movements, with a focus on the religious and gendered dimensions of Black nationalism. His current book project explores the Nation of Islam’s gendered religio-racial ideologies and its resistance to integration from the New Deal through the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. His scholarship appears in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, the Journal of Mormon History, and edited volumes on race, religion, and power in local and global contexts. He is a project affiliate of The Crossroads Project, co-editor of the Mormon Studies Review, and a contributing research associate for the Century of Black Mormons Project.

Alexia Williams is Assistant Professor of Religion and African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she also serves as Co-Director of Graduate Studies in Religion. She specializes in Afro-American religious history, Roman Catholicism, Afro-diasporic religions in hemispheric context, and American secularism. Her research and teaching explore how religious communities operate as sites of racial identity formation, political organizing, and aesthetic production for Black Americans. Her ongoing book project, titled Black Revolutionary Saints: Roman Catholicism & the U.S. Racial Imagination, examines Catholic lay efforts to canonize an African American saint within the Roman Catholic tradition. While the Vatican has yet to officially recognize a saint of African American descent, the veneration of these holy figures has become a key component of advocacy for racial justice in Catholic communities and institutions.

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.