Carpenter Cohort: Spring Semester training
In 2025, Sacred Writes has received a second round of funding from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation to hold public scholarship trainings for scholars focused on religion, gender, and sexuality. Please welcome the scholars accepted to the Spring Training!
Swasti Bhattacharya
independent scholar
Swasti Bhattacharyya (PhD, RN) Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Religion, has been researching, writing, and teaching in religious studies and applied ethics for over two decades. She examines ethical issues from multiple philosophical and religious perspectives. Her work is rooted in her upbringing as a daughter of an immigrant Hindu father from India and a Japanese Buddhist mother born and raised in Hawai’i. She utilized her experiences as a registered nurse and as an applied ethicist in several publications presenting Hindu perspectives on bioethical issues and on cultural humility. Her current creative nonfiction project combines her academic expertise with her long-term relationships with the women of the Brahma Vidya Mandir ashram, an intentional, spiritually-focused women’s community in rural central India.
Amanda Hernandez
Southwestern University
Amanda Hernandez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliate faculty member of the Feminist Studies and Race & Ethnicity Studies programs at Southwestern University. She is a proud graduate of San Antonio Community College. She received her B.A. in Women’s & Gender Studies from the University of Texas at San Antonio, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Baylor University. Her work focuses on the ways that white supremacy and sexism show up in U.S. Christian groups. She is the author of Intersectional Identities of Christian Women in the United States: Faith, Race, and Feminism (Lexington Books, 2024). Her work has been published in Conscience Magazine, Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Sociological Spectrum.
celene Ibrahim
Groton School
Dr. Celene Ibrahim is a multidisciplinary scholar specializing in Qur’anic studies, gender studies and interreligious relations. Her award-winning monograph Women and Gender in the Qur'an (Oxford University Press, 2020) received the Association of Middle East Women's Studies book prize and is being translated into multiple languages. She also authored Islam and Monotheism, an accessible primer on Islamic theology (Cambridge University Press 2022), edited One Nation, Indivisible: Seeking Liberty and Justice from the Pulpit to the Streets (Wipf & Stock 2019), and is featured in the Netflix docudrama Testament: The Story of Moses (2024). Ibrahim holds degrees from Princeton University (AB), Harvard Divinity School (MDiv), and Brandeis University (MA/PHD). She serves as a faculty member at Groton School in Religious Studies and Philosophy.
Shantanu mehra
york university
Shantanu Mehra (he/him) is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Canada. His broad research interests are at the intersection of race, Islam, gender, sovereignty, and secularism. For his PhD project, he is focusing on how the Twelver Shia Muslim community in Toronto engages the with politics of ‘reasonable accommodation’ as they register their religious difference and navigate Islamophobia in the Canadian multicultural public sphere. Before starting his PhD, he did his M.A. in Anthropology and Religion at the American University of Beirut and Melbourne, respectively. He has been active in the student union at York and serves as an executive in the York University Graduate Student Association (YUGSA).
Cathy Melesky Dante
Marquette University
Cathy Melesky Dante, MDiv, LCSW, is a PhD candidate at Marquette University in the Theology Department. Her dissertation addresses the problem of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and how lay people who love the church can respond. Cathy has an MSW from Springfield College and an MDiv from Washington Theological Union. With her extensive pastoral experience, she has worked as a social worker doing child abuse prevention trainings in Catholic parishes, a campus minister, and currently serves as a spiritual director. Her scholarship has been in Journal of Moral Theology and Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction + Companionship. In 2024, she received the inaugural Publicly Engaged Scholarship Award from the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities at Marquette University.
Sohini Pillai
kalamazoo College
Dr. Sohini Sarah Pillai (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of Religion, Director of Film and Media Studies, and the Marlene Crandell Francis Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Kalamazoo College. Her research interests include Hindu traditions, epic narratives, Indian cinema, and women in religion. She is the author of Krishna’s Mahabharatas: Devotional Retellings of an Epic Narrative(Oxford University Press, 2024) and the co-editor with Nell Shapiro Hawley of Many Mahabharatas(SUNY Press, 2021). Ongoing projects include a co-authored sourcebook with Emilia Bachrach and Jennifer D. Ortegren entitled Women in Hindu Traditions (NYU Press) and a monograph about cinematic adaptations of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. She is also co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Hinduism Unit and on the editorial board for Reading Religion.
saraswati pottekkatt
Foundation for the Preservation of mahayana thought
Saraswati is a student in the 6+ year FPMT (The Foundation for the Preservation of Mahayana Thought) Masters Program in Sutra and Tantra. They have studied, and continue to study, in multiple spiritual care programs, including Dr Pamela Ayo Yetunde's The Year of the Black Woman, Faith Matters' Movement Chaplaincy, and Union Theological Seminary's Women of Color in Ministry. Saraswati is a member of the Western States Center’s inaugural Commons Cohort which brings together faith and civic leaders to respond to oppression. They are trained in psilocybin facilitation by Naropa University's Psychedelic Center. Saraswati gratefully acknowledges that they study, practice, and teach on unceded Ohlone land.
khanum shaikh
california state university, northridge
Khanum Shaikh is a Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and the Director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her research interests include: the politics and practices of feminist knowledge production; gender-based struggles and interventions within Islam; gender and urban transformation in contemporary Pakistan; and the gendered and racial underpinnings of Islamophobia. Her published work has appeared in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2014); Feminist Formations (2017); Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (2018); Scholar and Feminist On-line (2021); Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (2020); and Feminist Studies (2022; 2023). She is the recipient of the 2024-2025 National Endowment of Humanities award, and the 2025 Fulbright award to pursue research on gender in contemporary Pakistan.
tess starman
howard university
Tess Starman (she/they) is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at Howard University. Her research specializes on intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and power at the nexus of religion and politics. She studies progressive Christian attitudes, religious exiting, and religion’s impact on political attitudes and engagement. Her dissertation, entitled, “A Corrupted Faith: The Role of Power in the Process of Christian Disaffiliation and Rise of the Religious Nones,” examines the religious exiting process and non-religious identity formation of ex-Christians. She serves as the Research Assistant for Howard University’s Initiative on Public Opinion. Tess is the co-chair of the American Sociological Association’s Student Advisory Board and serves on the Pedagogy Committee of Sociological Forum.
lucas wilson
university of toronto mississisauga
Formerly the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Calgary, Lucas is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto Mississauga. He is the author of At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Rutgers UP, 2025), which received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. He is also the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2025), as well as the co-editor of Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature (Lexington, 2023). His academic work has appeared in Modern Language Studies, Canadian Jewish Studies, Flannery O’Connor Review, Journal of Jewish Identities, and Studies in American Jewish Literature. His public-facing writing has appeared in The Advocate, Queerty, LGBTQ Nation, and Religion Dispatches, among other venues.
Rebecca Wolfe
Harvard University
Rebecca Wolfe is a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University. Graduating with a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2024, Rebecca’s research agenda focuses on the areas of gender, sexuality, the body, and mental health, particularly in the context of religion. Rebecca’s dissertation work examined bodily experiences of disordered eating and sexual dysfunction among people raised as women in purity culture, a Protestant evangelical movement. Rebecca has been published in academic journals including Health Affairs, Social Science and Medicine - Population Health, and Theology and Sexuality, and created public facing work on podcasts such as EDGES and Anthrodish, and through the Sage Knowledge video series.