Meet the Trainers

 
 
 

Liz Bucar

Liz Bucar is the Director of Sacred Writes, Professor of Religion, and Dean’s Leadership Fellow at Northeastern University. An expert in comparative religious ethics who has published on topics ranging from gender reassignment surgery to the global politics of modest clothing, She is the author of Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Harvard University Press, 2022) and the award-winning Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress (Harvard University Press, 2017). Her public scholarship includes bylines in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Teen Vogue, Religion Dispatches, and RNS, among others.

 

Brook Wilensky-Lanford

Brook Wilensky-Lanford is Associate Director of Sacred Writes. A writer, historian of American religion, and former editor-in-chief of Killing the Buddha, Brook is a contributor to The God Beat: What Journalism Says About Faith and Why It Matters (Broadleaf Books, 2021), and the author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press, 2011). Her writing has appeared in Religion Dispatches, Religion and Politics, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times Book Review, among others. She holds a PhD in Religion in the Americas from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University. Follow her on Twitter @modmyth. 

 
 
 
 
 
 

Ambre Dromgoole

Ambre Dromgoole (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in the Departments of Religious Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. She has published research in a variety of venues including the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of Ethnomusicology, Transposition: Musique et sciences sociales, The Revealer, and Black Perspectives. She has presented work at the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, and the Christian Congregational Music Conference and lectured at Princeton University, Oberlin College and Conservatory, and the University of California, Riverside. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation; Louisville Institute; Yale Center for Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration; the Center for Lived Religion in the Digital Age at Saint Louis University; Sacred Writes; and the Crossroads Project. She has worked as a curricular consultant with the Nashville Symphony and the National Museum of African American Music and as a research consultant with Sound Diplomacy. Her dissertation “There’s a Heaven Somewhere’: Itinerancy, Intimacy, and Performance in the Lives of Gospel Blues Women, 1915-1983” positions the friendships and collaborations of an intimate circle of Black women gospel musicians as untilled sites of critical Black feminist engagement, sociohistorical consideration, and nuanced religious analysis.

 

Suzanna Krivulskaya

Suzanna Krivulskaya (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University San Marcos, where she teaches courses in United States religion, gender, sexuality, and digital history. Krivulskaya specializes in modern U.S. history and studies the relationship between sexuality and religion. Her first book, Disgraced: How Sex Scandals Transformed American Protestantism (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), is a sweeping religious and cultural history of ministerial sex scandals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Krivulskaya’s work has appeared in both academic journals and popular outlets, and was honored by the 2019-2020 Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Award from the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. In 2022, she was named a Public Fellow in Religion and LGBTQ+ Rights by the Public Religion Research Institute.

 

Brett Krutzsch

Dr. Brett Krutzsch is an expert on LGBTQ politics and religion in the United States and a scholar at NYU's Center for Religion and Media, where he serves as editor of The Revealer. He is the author of the 2019 book Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics from Oxford University Press. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Newsday, Medium, the Advocate, and he has been featured on NPR and several podcasts.

 

Jorge Rodriguez

Dr. Jorge Juan Rodriguez V, the son of two Puerto Rican migrants, grew up with his parents, grandmother, and uncle in a small affordable housing community in urban Connecticut. His story of diaspora, translanguaging, race, and religion propelled his academic journey, leading him to degrees in biblical studies, social theory, liberation theologies, and a Ph.D. in History from Union Theological Seminary. His scholarship examines the intersections of race, religion, and social movements with a particular focus on Black and Brown religious activism in the 20th century, including groups like the New York Young Lords. Dr. Rodríguez is an administrator and educator. In addition to his role as Visiting Assistant Professor of Historical Studies at Union Theological Seminary, Dr. Rodriguez serves full-time as the Associate Director for Strategic Programming at the Hispanic Summer Program—a nonprofit that creates year-round educational spaces for Latinx graduate students of religion. Additionally, Dr. Rodríguez frequently consults with universities and organizations across the country to help them imagine and build more just economic, curricular, and labor systems in their institutions. Learn more about his work at www.jjrodriguezv.com and follow him on Twitter at @jjrodv.

 

Dheepa Sundaram

Dr. Dheepa Sundaram (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor of Hindu Studies at the University of Denver, which sits on the unceded tribal lands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people. She is a scholar of hate politics, ritual, nationalism, and digital culture in South Asian contexts. In addition to being a founding member of the South Asian Scholar Activist Collective (SASAC) and coauthor of the Hindutva Harassment Field Manual, her public-facing work has appeared in Religion News Service and The Immanent Frame. Her research focuses the formation of Hindu virtual religious publics through online platforms, social media, apps, and emerging technologies such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Her current monograph project, titled Globalizing Dharma: Ritual, Nationalism, and the Making of a Digital Hindu Brand, examines how commercial ritual websites fashion a new, digital canon for Hindu religious praxis, effectively marketing a cosmopolitan, dominant-caste Hinduism.