Our team

M. Cooper Harriss, Indiana University, Bloomington

M. Cooper Harriss is Associate Professor in Religious Studies and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. His research and teaching deploy a wide range of texts (including literature, vernacular music, preaching, and performance) to discern ways in which religious thought, belief, and practice both contribute to and are generated by the formation of diverse American cultures in US and transnational contexts. His recent work explores certain religious and theological dimensions of the concept of race, tracing critical religious terms of its development and cultural expression in American, African-American, and global contexts. His first book is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU 2017), and his essays and reviews have appeared in several publications including African American Review, Biblical Interpretation, Callaloo, The Immanent Frame, The Journal of Africana Religions, The Journal of Religion, Literature and Theology, and Soundings.

Sarah Imhoff, Indiana University, Bloomington

Sarah Imhoff is Associate Professor in Religious Studies and Borns Jewish Studies Program, Affiliated Faculty in the Gender Studies Department, Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society, and Adjunct Faculty in the History Department. She is broadly interested in religion and the body. Her research asks questions about how bodies and their attributes, such as gender, race, and ability, shaped and are shaped by religion. Underwriting many of her research projects are questions about how embodiment makes religious meaning, and how religious discourse makes bodies. Her first book is Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism, and her work has appeared in several publications including the Journal of Religion, Religion and American Culture, American Jewish History, Religious Studies Review, and Jewish Social Studies.

Maidah Khalid, Indiana University, Bloomington

Maidah Khalid is a PhD candidate in the Religious Studies department. She specializes in the study of legal personhood in medieval Islamic law. Broadly, her research and teaching lie at the intersection of Islamic legal history, Islam and gender, legal anthropology, religious studies, slavery studies and textual studies.

Charles McCrary, Eckerd College

Charles McCrary is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Eckerd College. He is a scholar of American religion, focusing on secularism, religious freedom, spirituality, race, and science. He is the author of Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is currently working on a few projects, including a book tentatively titled Peak Performance: Histories of Spiritual Optimization. His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & American Culture, and Religion. He also has written for popular outlets such as Religion & Politics, The Revealer, and The New Republic.

Ryan Harper, Fairfield University

Ryan Harper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Fairfield University where he teaches courses on American religion, spirituality and the arts, environmental spirituality, and African American religious history. He is the author of The Gaithers and Southern Gospel: Homecoming in the Twenty-First Century (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and My Beloved Had a Vineyard, winner of the 2017 Prize Americana in Poetry (Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2018). Ryan’s articles, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Tahoma Literary Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Killing the Buddha, Cimarron Review, Chattahoochee Review, and America.

Samira K. Mehta, University of Colorado, Boulder

Samira K. Mehta is an Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Blended Family in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America, examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the present and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. She is also working on a book of essays entitled The Racism of People Who Love You for Beacon Press.

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo, State University of New York, Buffalo

Ana Mariella Bacigalupo is Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Her research has focused on cultural transformation, systems of knowledge, and power—all from the perspective of Mapuche shamans from Chile and Argentina, their communities, and their critics. She analyzes how and why powerful outsiders imagine shamans as exotic remnants of a folkloric past, as sorcerers and gender deviants, as savage terrorists, or as lacking historical consciousness, and investigates the complex ways in which shamans and their communities challenge, transform, and play off these stereotypes in their discourses and practices for a variety of ends. She is the chair of the section of Religion and Spirituality of the Latin American Studies Association and Program Councilor for the Society for Latin American and the Caribbean Anthropology. Her most recent work is Thunder Shaman: Making History with Mapuche Spirits in Chile and Patagonia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016).

Lloyd D. Barba, Amherst College

Lloyd D. Barba is Assistant Professor of Religion and Core Faculty in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst College, where he teaches courses on evangelicalism, Latinx religion, and religion and immigration. He is the author of Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California (Oxford University Press, 2022), co-editor of Oneness Pentecostalism: Race, Gender and Culture (Penn State University Press, 2023), and editor of Latin American and Latinx Religion in North America (Bloomsbury: Religion in North America, 2023). His scholarship on Pentecostalism, Catholicism, the Sanctuary Movement, and material religion has been published in journals such as Journal of the American Academy of Religion, American Religion, Perspectivas, and MAVCOR and various edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook on Latinx Christianity, Faith and Power: Latino Religious Politics since 1945, and Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts, to name a few. He serves on the council of the American Society of Church History and co-chairs the History of Christianity Unit of the American Academy of Religion. He holds a BA in History and Religion from the University of the Pacific and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Michigan.

Brandon L. Bayne, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Brandon L. Bayne is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. His work focuses on European and indigenous encounters in the contact zones of the Americas. He is interested in the ways in which missionaries, soldiers, and native converts drew upon both Christian traditions and local experience to make sense of violent, often tragic colonial encounters. Specifically, he studies discourses of sacrifice and suffering in the Catholic missionary enterprises of colonial Latin America. His current book project, A Spectacle Before the World: Convert Suffering and Sacrificial Display in the Jesuit Missions of Northern New Spain, asks why tales of persecution became so prevalent in the Spanish borderlands and describes how both missionaries and converts sanctified their suffering through martyrological discourses using material, textual, and visual idioms. His work has appeared in publications including Religion Compass and Church History.

Jason C. Bivins, North Carolina State University

Jason C. Bivins is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies. He is a specialist in religion and American culture, focusing particularly on the intersection between religions and politics since 1900. He is the author of Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion, a study of the intersections of jazz and American religions in and across comparative themes/categories like ritual, community, and cosmology. Bivins has published most actively in the area of US political religions, the subject of his first two books, Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2008), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2008, and The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). He is currently working on his next monograph in political religions: Embattled Majority, a genealogy of the rhetoric of “religious bigotry” in conservative Christian politics since the 1960s. He also plays in several groups that perform what might be called non-idiomatic free improvisation and writes reviews of jazz, improvised music, and occasionally a heavy metal or new music record for multiple online and print outlets.

J. Kameron Carter, Indiana University, Bloomington

J. Kameron Carter is Professor of Religious Studies. Prior to his current appointment he was at Duke University as Associate Professor of Theology, English and Africana Studies in the Divinity School with appointments in the English Department and the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Department. He teaches in religious and theological studies by way of what some might call critical race studies but what he calls black studies looking especially at black social life as it intersects the sacred, as the deviant scene of alternative practices of the sacred. His first book is titled Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford UP, 2008), and he edited a collection of essays called Religion and the Future of Blackness in 2013 (a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly). He is currently finishing a book entitled Black Rapture: A Poetics of the Sacred.

Jessica Delgado, Ohio State University

Jessica Delgado is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and History. Her primary areas of teaching and research are the histories of women, gender, sexuality, religion, and race in Latin America—particularly in Mexico in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Other areas of particular interest include: colonial Catholicism; gender, race, caste, and religion in the early modern Atlantic World; the materiality of devotion; the relationship between religiosity and people’s experiences of the physical world and embodiment; and the intersection between social and spiritual status. Her first book, Troubling Devotion: Laywomen and the Church in Colonial Mexico, 1630-1770, looks at the ways laywomen’s religiosity and daily interactions with religious authorities, institutions, symbols, and ideas shaped the devotional landscape of colonial Mexico. Her current book project is called The Beata of the Black Habit: Race, Sexuality, and Religious Authority in Late Colonial Mexico takes the life and trial of an unknown female mystic to explore changes in religious culture, colonial power, and racialized ideologies of gender and sexuality in late eighteenth-century Mexico.

Spencer Dew, Ohio State University

Spencer Dew is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College and Associated Faculty of Religious Studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Lynne Gerber, Independent Scholar, San Francisco, CA

Lynne Gerber is an independent scholar in San Francisco, California. She’s the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexua Reorientation in Evangelical America (Chicago, 2011) and has written for American Quarterly, Gender & Society, The Revealer, and Religion Dispatches. Her current work is on religious responses to the emergence of HIV/AIDS in 1980s and 1990s San Francisco. It’s focused on the LGBTQ+ Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco. With Siri Colom and Ariana Nedelman, Gerber is the co-producer of the podcast When We All Get to Heaven and co-author of the American Religious Sounds Project digital exhibit The Pink and Purple Church in the Castro.

Greg Johnson, University of California, Santa Barbara

Greg Johnson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies. His research interests include contemporary indigenous traditions; religion and law, repatriation, method and theory. In particular, Johnson explores repatriation and reburial disputes in American Indian and Hawaiian contexts as a means to understand the ways religious claims are announced, enlivened, and contested in the contemporary moment. His first book, Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition (UVA Press) was published in 2007. Johnson’s current book project is provisionally entitled Religion in the Moment: Contemporary Lives of Indigenous Traditions. This project addresses several unfolding repatriation disputes in relationship to their larger cultural and historical frames. In an effort to theorize these disputes with reference to significant currents in the postcolonial study of religion, Johnson explores intra-communal tensions and religious differences in moments of intense friction to illuminate how such episodes animate cultural life and generate or amplify religious sensibilities. His work has appeared in several publications including Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Culture and Religion, and History of Religions.

Hillary Kaell, McGill University, Montréal

Hillary Kaell is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal. She is also a faculty fellow in the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University where she co-directs the Sensing Atmospheres working group. She is author of Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage (New York UP, 2014) and editor of Everyday Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec (McGill-Queens UP, 2017). Her most recent book is Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States (Princeton UP, 2020), which examines the development of US Christians' global networks and imaginaries through the lens of one of the world's most lucrative fundraising tools. She regularly publishes across a few intersecting fields in venues including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, American Quarterly, American Anthropologist, and the American Historical Review. She has written for popular audiences online and in print, and collaborated on a number of public education projects, including as a paid consultant on the PBS television series God in America. Currently, she serves as co-editor of the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion book series with Palgrave Macmillan press.

Philippa Koch, Missouri State University

Philippa Koch is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies. Her main research interest is the history of religion in America, with a focus on colonial America and the Atlantic world. In her book project, Persistent Providence: Healing Body and Soul in Early America, she examines how Christian communities responded to sickness and epidemics in a context of ever-new medical and scientific developments. Her teaching on health and body brings this research to the modern world, and she enjoys exploring the connections between past and present and the continuing relevance of the themes of medicine, body, sexuality, and emotion in American religion. She has published articles in Religions (2018) and Church History (2015 & 2016), The Atlantic (2016), Notches (2016), and Sightings (2012).

Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, Kalamazoo College

Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada is Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College, and received her PhD from Princeton University. She is an ethnographer specializing in Religion in the Americas, with a focus on masculinity, Catholicism, material culture, and urban religion. Her forthcoming book Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Practice in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is an ethnographic study that examines the religious and devotional lives of Catholic men. It explores how the parish is a vital site for the making of masculinities and how devotional traditions—and the very materiality and labor essential to their making—structure men’s pursuit and achievement of manhood.

Carlos A. Manrique, Universidad de los Andes

Carlos A. Manrique is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department in the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá. His research interests have pursued three interrelated paths: the deployment of forms of epistemic colonialism and violence in conceptualizations of religion throughout modern philosophy; the productivity of certain resources found in post-structuralist political thought, specially the works of Foucault and Derrida, to approach social and political phenomena of the contemporary world such as the convergences between forms of religiosity and spirituality, and forms of political militancy in social movements in Colombia and Latin America; finally, the way in which distinct figures of the “theologico-political” conceptualized in the tradition of critical theory may introduce new angles of analysis into the question regarding the diversified and often conflicting ethical and political effects of religious discourses and practices vis-a-vis the challenges of peace building in the fragile transitional scenario nowadays at place in Colombia. For advancing in this last project he was a beneficiary of a Fulbright scholarship for a research stay at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University’s Divinity School, between January and May of 2019. His work has appeared in Revista de Estudios Sociales, Philosophy Today, Revista Principios, New Centennial Review, and the book Intervenciones filosóficas en medio del conflicto: debates sobre la construcción de paz en Colombia hoy (Philosophical interventions in the midst of conflict: debates regarding peace-building in Colombia).

John Lardas Modern, Franklin & Marshall College

John Lardas Modern is Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College where he teaches classes on American religious history, literature, technology, and aesthetics.. Former Editor-at-Large for The Immanent Frame, he co-curated Frequencies and co-edits Class 200: New Studies in Religion (both with Kathryn Lofton). Modern is the author of Secularism in Antebellum America (University of Chicago Press) and The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs (University of Illinois Press). The Religion Machine; or, a particular history of the brain is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Modern is also working on a long-term project that explores the end of the world through the lens of Akron, OH. Modern’s work has been funded by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council. He is currently a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and was an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in 2018-19.

Elaine Peña, George Washington University

Elaine Peña is Associate Professor of American Studies. Her main areas of research include Anthropology of Religion, Built Environment, Performance Theory, Transnationalism, Border Studies, Latino Studies, Latin American Studies (Mexico). Her first book, Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe (University of California Press, 2011), examines Guadalupan sacred space production among working-class Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals living between Illinois and central Mexico. She is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the tradition of commemorating George Washington’s Birthday on the Texas-Tamaulipas border. Her work has appeared in several publications including The Drama Review, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, American Literary History, and American Quarterly.

Seth Perry, Princeton University

Seth Perry is Assistant Professor of Religion. He joined the Princeton faculty in 2014. He is interested in American religious history, with a particular focus on print culture and religious authority. Perry’s first book, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States (Princeton University Press, 2018) explores the performative, rhetorical, and material aspects of bible-based authority in early-national America. His other recent work includes “The Many Bibles of Joseph Smith: Textual, Prophetic, and Scholarly Authority in Early-National Bible Culture” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and “Scripture, Time, and Authority among Early Disciples of Christ” in Church History. His current book project is a biography of Lorenzo Dow, the early-national period’s most famous itinerant preacher (his article on Dow appeared in 2015). Perry’s work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Common-place, The Huffington Post, and the LA Review of Books.

Anthony Petro, Boston University

Anthony Petro (Ph.D., Religion, Princeton University) is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion and in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program. His teaching and research interests include religion and culture in the United States; religion, medicine, and public health; and gender and sexuality studies. His first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015), examines the history of US American religious responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis and their role in the promotion of ongoing forms of moral citizenship. He has published essays on a number of topics, including histories of Catholic sexual abuse, critical disability studies and religion, the religious politics of camp, and approaches to studying race, gender, and sexuality in North American religion. Petro’s research engages questions about religion and secularism, the cultural politics of morality, and religious formations of bodies. He is currently writing a book called Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Sacred in the Modern United States (under contract with Oxford University Press), which traces heated debates over sex, art, and religion to reveal competing genealogies of the sacred and the secular in the modern US, especially during the heyday of the culture wars. It explores how a range of feminist and queer artists have engaged religious themes and rituals in their work, spanning from Judy Chicago’s 1979 The Dinner Party to the controversy surrounding David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in the Belly as part of 2010’s “Hide/Seek” exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. Provoking Religion asks how this archive of visual and performance art helps us to rethink key categories in the study of religion and in gender and sexuality studies.

Sitna Quiroz, Durham University

Sitna Quiroz is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University. She is a social anthropologist. Her work broadly focuses on the study of Christianity in postcolonial contexts (Latin America and Africa). She is interested in how the legacy of the colonial experience in both regions has shaped religious dynamics, and Christianity’s impact on kinship, gender, and sexuality. She has experience doing ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and the Republic of Benin. Her ethnographic work in Mexico explored a prophetic-millenarian movement, with a female charismatic leader, among the indigenous Nahua of the Huasteca region. This work was published as Evangelizacion o Fanatismo en la Huasteca? El Caso de Amalia Bautista, by CIESAS in 2008. Her current book project tentatively titled Children of God: Intimacy, Belonging and Exclusion in Postcolonial Benin, explores how conversion to Pentecostalism contributes to redefining kinship and gender relations in religiously and ethnically plural setting, thus creating dynamics of belonging and exclusion.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Indiana University, Bloomington

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, Affiliate Professor of Law, Maurer School of Law, and Director of the Center for Religion and the Human. She is interested in religion as a broad and complex social and cultural phenomenon that both generates law and is regulated by law. She is the author of three books analyzing legal discourses about religion in the context of actions brought to enforce the religion clauses of the First Amendment and related legislation: Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Harvard 1994), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton 2005), and Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton 2009). Her fourth book, A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law (Chicago 2014), portrays the chaplain and her ministry as a product of the legal regulation of religion and as a form of spiritual governance. Her most recent book is Church State Corporation (Chicago 20220), exploring the figure of the church in US law. She is also co-author of Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State (with Paul Johnson and Pamela Klassen) (Chicago 2018) and The Abyss or Life is Simple: Reading Knausgaard, Writing Religion (Chicago 2022) and co-editor of After Secular Law (Stanford 2011), Varieties of Religious Establishment (Ashgate 2013), Theologies of American exceptionalism (Indian 2021), Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago 2015), and At Home and Abroad: the Politics of American Religion (Columbia 2021).She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Kristen Tobey, John Carroll University

Kristen Tobey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. She is a sociologist of religion who researches the dynamics and mechanisms of religious identity, community, and boundaries in the pluralistic context of the contemporary United States. Her first book, Plowshares: Protest, Performance, and Identity in the Nuclear Age (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016) explores the religio-political world of a group of radical Catholic anti-nuclear activists, who trespass onto nuclear facilities to bring about “symbolic disarmament” by hammering and pouring their own blood over the equipment. She has also written about the Plowshares in the Journal of Religion and the Journal of Political Theology. Her current research examines the “in-between” religious identities of people who feel disconnected from a religious community but do not wish to leave the community. She is looking at how these individuals blend affiliation and disaffiliation into new forms of religious identity and community, and what they reveal about the contemporary American religious landscape.

Jolyon Thomas, University of Pennsylvania

Jolyon Thomas is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD from Princeton University, an MA from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and a BA from Grinnell College. His first book, Drawing on Tradition: Manga, Anime, and Religion in Contemporary Japan, was published by University of Hawai‘i Press in 2012. His second book, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan, is now available from University of Chicago Press. With the generous support of a Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership/Social Science Research Council Abe Fellowship, he is now working on a third book, tentatively titled Difficult Subjects: Debating Religion and Public Education in Japan and the United States.

Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and the Chair of the Department of Religion. Her field is American religious history, with emphasis on 20th century African American religious history; religion, race, and gender; and religion in American film and popular culture. She is the author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU, 2017), Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (California, 2007), and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard, 1997). She is also a co-editor of the journal Religion and American Culture. Her current research examines the intersections of psychiatry, race, and African American religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to her appointment in Religion, she is affiliated with the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She serves on the Executive Committees of the Program in American Studies and the Center for the Study of Religion.

Alexis S. Wells-Oghoghomeh, Stanford University

Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh is an Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies department at Stanford University. A historian of African-American religion, her teaching and research examine the religiosity of enslaved people in the South, religion in the African Atlantic, and women’s religious histories. Her book The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South (UNC Press, 2021) is a gendered history of enslaved people’s religiosity from the colonial period to the onset of the Civil War. She is currently at work on a second project that traces the gendered, racialized history of “witchcraft” as a sociocultural category and loose collection of misidentified practices in the United States.

Kayla Renée Wheeler, Xavier University

Kayla Renée Wheeler is Assistant Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. She received her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Iowa in May 2017. Her research interests include Islam in the Americas, Islam and gender, digital identity, religion and media, material religion, and Black performativity. Currently, she is conducting research tentatively for her book entitled, Fashioning Black Islam, which will explore how Black Muslim fashion designers, stylists, and social media taste makers use fashion to challenge hegemonic Islamic femininity, to create alternative modes of Islamic knowledge production and transmission by centering materiality and embodied practices, and to construct networks of belonging based on a shared Black Muslim Woman identity that is facilitated by social media. Her work has appeared in several publications including Fieldwork in Religion, Black Culture and Experience: Contemporary Issues, Controversies in Contemporary Religion: Public and Ethical Controversies, Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet, and Religion News Service. She is the curator of the #BlackIslamSyllabus.

Melissa M. Wilcox, University of California, Riverside

Melissa M. Wilcox is Professor and Holstein Family and Community Chair of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author or editor of several books and journal issues, and numerous articles on gender, sexuality, and religion. Her books include Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community; Sexuality and the World’s Religions; Queer Women and Religious Individualism; Religion in Today’s World: Global Issues, Sociological Perspectives; and Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody. She has two textbooks due out soon in the areas of sexuality studies in religion and queer and transgender studies in religion, and she is working on new book projects on the intersections of religious studies and queer theory and on leather spirituality.

Joseph Winters, Duke University

Joseph Winters is the Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African and African American Studies. He also holds secondary positions in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. His interests lie at the intersection of black religious thought, African-American literature, and critical theory. Overall, his project expands conventional understandings of black religiosity and black piety by drawing on resources from Af-Am literature, philosophy, and critical theory. His research examines how literature, film, and music (especially hip hop) can reconfigure our sense of the sacred and imagination of spirituality. Winters' first book, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress (Duke University Press, June 2016) examines how black literature and aesthetic practices challenge post-racial fantasies and triumphant accounts of freedom. The book shows how authors like WEB Du Bois and Toni Morrison link hope and possibility to melancholy, remembrance, and a recalcitrant sense of the tragic. His second book project (under contract with Duke University Press) is called Disturbing Profanity: Hip Hop, Black Aesthetics, and the Volatile Sacred.