EFSR Welcomes Four New Board Members!
Please welcome our newest EFSR board members!
See their linked profiles below and visit our current and past board membership for more information.
Maytha Alhassen, University of Southern California
Maytha Alhassen is a Syrian-American journalist, poet and scholar. Her work bridges the worlds of social justice, academic research, media engagement and artistic expression. She recently defended and submitted her doctoral dissertation in American Studies and Ethnicity from University of Southern California (USC).
Research Interests: Historical encounters between Black internationalism and the Arab diaspora, race and ethnicity, social justice and the arts, travel and global flows, gender, media and narrative healing.
Highlight: More recently, Alhassen completed a TED residency that culminated in a performance of poem she wrote for her ancestral homeland of Syria. In a departure from standard TED talk structure, the poem was born out of a desire to deracinate popular narrative scrips that imagine Syria as a “geography of violence.”
Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Chicago Theological School
Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder is an author, minister, and Bible and pop culture educator. She serves as Associate Professor of Theological Field Education and New Testament and Director of the ACTS DMin in Preaching Program at Chicago Theological Seminary.
Dr. Crowder was a Fund for Theological Education Dissertation Fellow, Wabash Center for Teaching Fellow and Louisville Institute Summer Grant recipient. She has contributed to The Covenant Bible Study and Video Series and True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, and most recently Parenting as Spiritual Practice and Source for Theology. She served on the Editorial Boards of ON Scripture and Feasting on the Gospels and blogs for The Huffington Post and Inside in Higher Education. Her article on yoga can be found in the Disciples Women magazine. Dr. Crowder was a keynote speaker for the 2015 Festival of Faiths, 2017 Hampton University Ministers’ Conference and inducted in the Morehouse College Collegium of Scholars (2017).
Research Interests: The Bible in/and pop culture, Womanist biblical hermeneutics, leadership and ministry.
Highlight: Her newest book is When Momma Speaks: The Bible and Motherhood From a Womanist Perspective.
Alison L. Joseph, The Jewish Theological Seminary
Alison L. Joseph is an adjunct assistant professor of the Hebrew Bible and its Interpretation at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the assistant managing editor of The Posen Library of Jewish Civilization and Culture. Her research explores the processes by which the Hebrew Bible was produced, bringing together historiographical, literary, and gender criticism as it illuminates the author/redactor’s role in interpreting and rewriting earlier texts. Her current project, Damning Dinah: The Priestly Battle against Intermarriage, looks at intermarriage and women’s sexuality in the Hebrew Bible and explores how late authorial voices reflect a growing concern with foreign infiltration. Her first book, Portrait of the Kings: The Davidic Prototype in Deuteronomistic Poetics, received the 2016 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. She earned her PhD in Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
Research Interests: Sexuality and gender in the Hebrew Bible, the Bible in pop culture, biblical historiography, feminist historiography.
Highlight: Check out Alison’s analysis of Genesis in Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was featured on “The Shiloh Project.”
Melissa Pagán, Mount Saint Mary’s University
Melissa Pagán is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Religious Studies at Mount Saint Mary’s University. She holds a Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Society from Emory University, an MA in Bioethics, and an MA in Theology from Loyola Marymount University. Her research privileges feminist decolonial lenses to illuminate how the logics of the coloniality of gender manifest in Roman Catholic teachings on gender and sexuality and in the assumed human subject in Catholic Social Thought. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS) and as a co-convener of the Latina/o Theology Consultation of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA).
Research Interests: The concept of coloniality/decoloniality and gender and sexuality, social ethics, social movements, and decolonial feminisms.
Highlight: Check Melissa’s “Watering ‘Strange Fruit’ Trees: Flint and the Lack of Catholic Solidarity,” (Symposium Ethics: An Online Communion of Christian Ethicists).
EFSR BOARD
Grace Ji-Sun Kim, Co-editor, Associate Professor of Theology, Earlham School of Religion
Michal Raucher, Co-editor, Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Cincinnati
Midori E. Hartman, EFSR Submissions Editor, Drew University Theological School
Maytha Alhassen, University of Southern California
Stephanie Buckhanon Crowder, Chicago Theological School
Sharon Jacob, Philips Theological Seminary
Alison L. Joseph, The Jewish Theological Seminary
Joseph Marchal, Ball State University
Peter Anthony Mena, University of San Diego
Kate Ott, Drew University Theological School
Melissa Pagán, Mount Saint Mary’s University
Najeeba Syeed, Claremont School of Theology
Michelle Voss Roberts, Wake Forest University
Keep an eye out for our new board members at FSR Blog and follow us on Facebook and Twitter!