ACLS cOHORT

With our funding from the 2023 Luce/ACLS Programming Grants in Religion, Journalism, and International Affairs, we are offering the Extended Public Scholarship on Religion Fellowship Program to a cohort of untenured scholars. This program consists of a three-day training (January 13-15 in Boston) plus five months of online programming with editors, and one-on-one mentorship from Sacred Writes Staff. The cohort of extended training public scholars are listed alphabetically below.

WINTER 2024

Elyse Ambrose

University of California Riverside

Elyse Ambrose (Ph.D., Religion and Society, Drew University) is a blackqueer ethicist, creative, and educator. Their forthcoming book, A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark) offers a transreligious and communal-based sexual ethics grounded in blackqueer archive. Ambrose’s photo-sonic exhibition, “Spirit in the Dark Body: Black Queer Expressions of the Im/material,” explores black queer and trans spiritualities, identity, and poiesis. Currently Assistant Professor in the Departments for the Study of Religion and of Black Study at the University of California, Riverside, their commentary is featured in the Huffington Post, Vice, BMoreArt, and CBC Radio One’s Tapestry podcast. Their research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Columbia University's Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice, Henry Luce Foundation, and Yale University LGBT Studies Fellowship.

 
 

Sophie Bjork-James

Vanderbilt University

Sophie Bjork-James (Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology, City University of New York) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years of experience researching both the US based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers 2021, winner of the Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize) and the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (2020). She has been interviewed on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today, and in the New York Times. Her work has received support the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the American Academy of Religion, the National Science Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

 
 

Patrick D'Silva

University of Denver

Patrick J. D’Silva (Ph.D., Islamic Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is a faculty member of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Denver. His current research projects include analyzing the intersection of race, religion, and cultural appropriation in contemporary science fiction, as well as the history of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have engaged with yoga. His previous research examines the circulation of esoteric breathing practices between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia during the early-modern period. He is the co-author (with Carl Ernst) of the forthcoming Breathtaking Revelations: The Science of Breath from the Fifty Kamarupa Verses to Hazrat Inayat Khan. He lives in Boulder, CO with his family.

 
 

Nancy Khalil

University of Michigan

Nancy A. Khalil (Ph.D., Anthropology, Harvard University) is currently an Assistant Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan appointed in the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program. Her forthcoming manuscript focuses on US Muslim seminaries and the profession of US imams. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale’s Center on Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration and the University of Michigan Collegiate Postdoctoral Fellowship. Khalil has served on a number of non-profit organization boards including as a co-founder and board member of the Boston-based Muslim Justice League; and, currently, she serves on the Board for Pillars Fund. Prior to her academic career, she worked in higher education and student development, including as Muslim Chaplain at Wellesley College.

 
 

Bhakti Mamtora

University of Arizona

Bhakti Mamtora (Ph.D., Religion, University of Florida) is Assistant Professor of South Asian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona. Broadly, her research interests include print culture, book history, migration, and transnational religion. Her current book project employs archival, textual, and ethnographic methods to examine the genesis and reception of the Swāmīnī Vāto in the Swaminarayan Sampraday during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published journal articles in Fieldwork in Religion and Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts, and entries in Hinduism in Five Minutes and Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism.

 
 

Charles McCrary

Eckerd College

Charles McCrary (Ph.D., Religion, Florida State University) is an assistant professor of religious studies at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He researches and teaches broadly on American religion, especially topics related to politics, race, secularism, and science. His first book, Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press, 2022), examines the history of “sincerely held religious belief” and how that became a standard for legal understandings of religion in religious freedom cases. He is currently in the early stages of a project about a “crank,” in which he explores how religious, scientific, and political fringes are defined as such. McCrary has written in scholarly journals as well as popular outlets such as The Revealer, Religion & Politics, and The New Republic.

 
 

Sana Patel

University of Toronto

Dr. Sana Patel, (Ph.D., Religious Studies, University of Ottawa) has distinguished herself as a scholar specializing in Digital Islam. She is the recipient of the 2023 Digital Religion Research Award presented by The Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies. After completing a Postdoctoral Fellowship focused on systemic Islamophobia in Canada, Sana is keen on exploring how Islamophobia manifests in online spaces and how digital technology shapes global anti-Muslim experiences. Her research interests include studying digital religion, religious diversity, religious authority, religion and immigration, Islamophobia, and nonreligion. Sana’s recent publications include: “Religion and Media in Canada” (2021), “Hybrid Imams: Young Muslims and Religious Authority on Social Media” (2021), and “Islamophobia in North America” (2023).

 
 

Aizaiah Yong

Claremont School of Theology

Rev. Aizaiah G. Yong (Ph.D., Practical Theology, Claremont School of Theology) serves as Assistant Professor of Spirituality at the Claremont School of Theology in Southern California, USA. He is an ordained Pentecostal Christian minister within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a recognized facilitator in the Compassion Practice and an Internal Family Systems Practitioner. Growing up in a multiracial and immigrant family, he is committed to sustaining transformational and collective efforts that address ongoing realities of social oppression with presence, passion, and peace.