Series Advisory Committee

Penny Edgell is a Professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, who received her doctorate from the University of Chicago.  A cultural sociologist, she studies contemporary American religion with a particular focus on how religious cultural frames and symbolic boundaries affect social inclusion and exclusion. Author of Congregations in Conflict and Religion and Family in a Changing Society, her work has also appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Religion in American Culture, Social Forces, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Annual Review of Sociology.  Read More…

Marla Frederick is Professor of African and African American Studies and of the Study of Religion at Emory University.  A graduate of Spelman College with a BA in English, Professor Frederick earned her PhD in cultural anthropology at Duke University where she completed research on issues at the intersection of religion, race, class and gender.  She is the author/co-author of four books and several articles.  Her first ethnography, Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (U. of California Press, 2003), is an ethnographic study of Baptist women’s social and political engagement in eastern North Carolina. Read More…

Sarah McFarland Taylor is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and in the Program in Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University, where her undergraduate and graduate seminars on American religion, media, and culture cross over into the areas of Radio, Television, and Film and Screen Cultures. Author of the award-winning ethnographic monograph, Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (Harvard 2008), Taylor’s current book project, Ecopiety: Media, Green Virtue, and the Storied Earth (NYU, forthcoming), concerns the intersections of media, environment, and popular moral engagement. Read more…

Gerardo Martí, Ph.D. is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Davidson College. An active scholar, Professor Martí is author of seven books, including American Blindspot: Race, Class, Religion, and the Trump Presidency (Rowman & Littlefield). His book, The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity (Oxford University Press), co-authored with Gladys Ganiel, received the 2015 Distinguished Book Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Currently, Dr. Martí’s research is funded generously through Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Thriving Congregations Initiative and focused on churches actively confronting racial injustice. Read More…

Robert Orsi is Grace Craddock Nagle Chair of Catholic Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1981 and has taught at Fordham University, Indiana University, Harvard Divinity School and Harvard University (where he was Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion), before moving to Northwestern in 2008. He is the author of many prize-winning books, among them The Madonna of 115^th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (Yale University Press, third edition, 2010); Thank You, Saint Jude: Women’s Devotions to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (Yale 1996); and Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton 2005).  Read More…