Contributors

Elisabeth Anker

Professor Libby Anker's research and teaching interests are at the intersection of political theory, critical theory, cultural analysis, and media studies. Prof. Anker received her PhD in Political Theory from UC Berkeley, where she also received a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. She has held research fellowships at Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and UC Berkeley's Charles Travers Fellowship in Ethics and Politics. Her research has also been supported by multiple faculty grants from The George Washington University. 

Benjamin L. Berger

Professor Benjamin Berger is a Professor and the York Research Chair in Pluralism and Public Law at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, where he served as Associate Dean (Students) from 2015-2018.  He also holds an appointment as Professor (status only) in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto and is a member of the faculty of the Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies at York University.  His areas of research and teaching specialization are law and religion, criminal and constitutional law and theory, and the law of evidence. He is the author of Law’s Religion: Religious Difference and the Claims of Constitutionalism (University of Toronto Press, 2015), is a general editor of the Hart Publishing series Constitutional Systems of the World, and convenes the Osgoode Colloquium in Law, Religion & Social Thought.

Faisal Devji

Dr. Faisal Devji has held faculty positions at the New School in New York, Yale University and the University of Chicago, from where he also received his PhD in Intellectual History. Devji was Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, and Head of Graduate Studies at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, from where he directed post-graduate courses in the Near East and Central Asia. He is interested in Indian political thought as well as that of modern Islam. Devji’s broader concerns have to do with ethics and violence in a globalized world.

Spencer Dew

Spencer Dew is visiting assistant professor at Denison University and instructor in religious studies at Ohio State University. His book, The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali (Chicago, 2019) provides a window onto religion, race, citizenship, and law in America.

Stephanie Frank

Stephanie Frank is associate professor of instruction in religion and the humanities in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences department at Columbia. Prof. Frank has published extensively on various problematics related to secularization in journals of anthropology, intellectual history, political science, and religious studies. Stephanie’s current project is a book considering the methodological divergences between Durkheim and Mauss as exemplifying two different critiques of religion.

Constance Furey

Constance Furey is a scholar of Renaissance and Reformation Christianity, interested especially in the emergence of new types of religious and intellectual communities and theoretical questions of relationality and intersubjectivity. She wrote on religious humanism in her first book, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge, 2006), and has published several articles and essays on the intertwining of friendship and utopian thought in early modern England. Her latest book, Poetic Relations: Intimacy and Faith in the English Reformation, focuses on how devotional poetry by both male and female writers in the English Renaissance re-imagined intimate relationships as sites of utopian longing and fulfillment.

W. Clark Gilpin

W. Clark Gilpin is the Margaret E. Burton Professor, emeritus, at the Divinity School, where he served as dean from 1990 to 2000.  From 2000 to 2004 he directed the Martin Marty Center, and he has also served as the director of the university’s Nicholson Center for British Studies and as a member of the executive council of the university’s Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture.  Gilpin studies the history of modern Christianity, especially in relation to literature, and is currently writing about the letter from prison as a genre of religious literature in early modern England. 

M. Cooper Harriss

M. Cooper Harriss is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University, in Bloomington, where his teaching and research focus on American religion, literature, and culture. He is the author of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU 2017)—in addition to other articles published in African American Review, The Journal of Africana Religions, Biblical Interpretation, The Journal of Religion, and Literature and Theology (among other venues)—and is at work on a book about Muhammad Ali and the irony of American religion.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is Professor of Political Science and Crown Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Politics of Secularism in International Relations and Beyond Religious Freedom: The New Global Politics of Religion, both published by Princeton, and co-editor of Politics of Religious Freedom and Comparative Secularisms in a Global Age. She co-directs the “Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad” and “Talking Religion: Publics, Politics, and the Media” research projects, and co-convenes the Global Politics and Religion Faculty Research Group.

Shaul Magid

Shaul Magid’s teaching focuses primarily on Kabbala, Hasidism, Judaism and gender, Israel/Palestine, and American Jewish thought and culture. Areas of interest and research include sixteenth century Kabbala, Hasidism, American Judaism, and contemporary conceptions of Jewish religiosity. He is the author of Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica and Radzin Hasidism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008) which was awarded the 2008 American Academy of Religion Award for best book in religion in the textual studies category.

Noah Salomon

Noah Salomon is associate professor of Religion at Carleton College in Islamic Studies. A  2018 recipient of a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, he is currently based in Beirut, Lebanon working on a book manuscript that takes Sudan and Lebanon as case studies to explore theological reflections on Islamic futures in times of revolution.  His first book For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan's Islamic State was the winner of the 2017 Albert Hourani Prize from the Middle East Studies Association and the 2017 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Analytical/Descriptive Studies) from the American Academy of Religion.

Matthew Scherer

Matthew Scherer is an Associate Professor of Government and Politics in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He directs the undergraduate program in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and teaches courses in ancient, modern, and contemporary political theory, and constitutional law. He has held appointments as a Research Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs; as a Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University; and as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Lisa H. Sideris

In the broadest sense, List Sideris is interested in the value and ethical significance of natural processes, as these values are captured or occluded by religious and scientific worldviews. Her areas of research include environmental ethics and the environmental humanities and the science-religion interface. Her recent research has focused on the role of wonder in contemporary scientific discourse and its impact on how we conceive of and relate to nature. Her current book, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (University of California Press, July 2017) examines how scientific rhetoric and narratives about wonder actually pit science against religion, and encourage a devaluation of the natural world.

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

Winnifred Sullivan is Provost Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Director of the Center of Religion and the Human at Indiana University Bloomington. She is author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton 2005), Prison Religion (Princeton 2009), A Ministry of Presence (Chicago 2016), and Church State Corporation (Chicago 2020) and co-editor of Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago 2016).

Joseph Winters

Joseph Winters is an assistant professor of Religious Studies with a secondary position in the Department of African and African American Studies. His interests lie in African-American Religious Thought, Religion and Critical Theory, Af-Am Literature, and Continental philosophy. Overall, his project is concerned with troubling and expanding our understanding of black religiosity and black piety by drawing on resources from Af-Am literature, philosophy, and critical theory. Winters' first book, Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress examines how black literature and aesthetic practices challenge post-racial fantasies and triumphant accounts of freedom.