Carpenter Cohort: January intensive 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. First up, please welcome the scholars accepted to the January Intensive!

Tazeen M. Ali

Washington University in St. Louis

Tazeen M. Ali (she/her) is assistant professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching focus on Islam and gender, US Islam, and race and religion in America. She is the author of The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority & Community in US Islam (NYU Press, 2022). She has also published in Religion & Politics (now ARC Mag), The Conversation, The Maydan, and Middle East Eye. Ali is currently writing her second book, Muslims on Screen: Racism and Sexuality in Anglo-American Islam, which analyzes entertainment media projects produced by British and American Muslims. She also serves on the advisory board of the National Museum of American Religion. Ali earned her PhD in Religious Studies from Boston University in 2019.

Jacob Barrett

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jacob Barrett is a PhD student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests are grounded in questions about religion and governance, law, and the state, drawing on queer theory and the critical study of religion. His dissertation project examines the ways religion and sex are co-constitutively constructed as categories of governance and adjudicated into discourse at key moments in the history of the Supreme Court in the United States. In addition to his research, Jacob holds a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from UNC and has worked in media and communications for several scholarly organizations, including the North American Association for the Study of Religion and the American Academy of Religion – Southeast Region.

Destinee bates

Union Theological Seminary

Destinee Bates (she/her) is a Master of Divinity candidate at Union Theological Seminary, concentrating on Religion and the Black Experience. Her interests bridges Black aesthetics and the curation of identity, examining their intersections with the disciplinary gaze, desirability politics, and racial erotics. Through this work, she seeks to illuminate how systemic oppression shapes perceptions of beauty, desirability, and self-expression within racialized contexts. With a strong background in public policy and advocacy, Destinee has represented the Episcopal Church on global platforms, including COP26 and COP28, advancing critical dialogues on climate justice and gender equality. Her work reimagines the intersection of faith and justice to create transformative spaces that challenge tired narratives and uplift unheard voices.

Mickey Correa

The LGBT CEnter

Mickey Correa, LCSW, M.Div., is a native New Yorker, a bilingual and bicultural Afro-
Puerto Rican licensed mental health professional, and an ordained United Methodist
Clergy. He is the Senior Director of Behavioral Health at The LGBT Center. Mickey has extensive direct practice working with individuals, groups, couples, and families along with supervisory and nonprofit administrator experience. Mickey earned his MSW from Fordham University School of Social Service, an M.Div. from New York Theological Seminary and is currently a PhD student in Social Welfare at the CUNY Graduate Center. Mickey's research and academic interests include the intersection of race, gender, class and spirituality in mental health, with a specific interest in the mental health of Black and Latino men, bilingual persons, and Queer communities.

Amy Fallas

University of california at Santa Barbara

Amy Fallas is a PhD Candidate in History at UC Santa Barbara. She holds an MA in History from Yale and her research examines religious difference, charitable networks, and historical memory in the Middle East. Her work has been supported by the American Research Center in Egypt, the American Society for Church History, the Orthodox Christian Studies Center among others. She is the Associate Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and serves on the steering committees of the History of Christianity and Middle Eastern Christianity units of the American Academy of Religion. Her scholarship appears in History Compass and Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations and her essays are published in the Washington Post, Jadaliyya, Mada Masr, the Revealer, Sojourners and more. She is based in Beirut.

Kelsey Hanson Woodruff

Harvard University

Kelsey Hanson Woodruff is a PhD candidate in Religion at Harvard University. Her dissertation is a historical and ethnographic study of digital communities of post-evangelical feminists in the twenty-first century. She is also writing a biography of millennial author Rachel Held Evans. Hanson Woodruff’s work has been supported by the Louisville Institute, the SSRC’s Religion, Spirituality and Democratic Renewal fellowship, and the Weatherhead Center. Her research and teaching interests include evangelicalism and post-evangelicalism, religion and gender, and religion and American politics.

Beck A. Henriksen
rhodes college

Dr. Beck A. Henriksen (they/them) is a scholar of gender theory, sexuality studies, and religious studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. They received their Ph.D. in Religious Studies and a Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They also hold an M.A.R. from Yale Divinity School and an M.A. in Performance Studies from Brown University. Beck’s first project focuses on Southern Baptist beliefs around gender, leadership, and LGBT policies in contemporary post-genocide Rwanda. Their second project examines trans artists’ responses to medical care in the context of politicized Christianity in the United States.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Spring Carpenter Foundation Public Scholarship Training Cohort Selected