People

Dr. Monique Moultrie is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State University and was recently a Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and African American Religion at Harvard Divinity School. She earned degrees from Vanderbilt University, Harvard Divinity School, and Duke University. Her scholarly pursuits include projects in sexual ethics, African American religions, and gender and sexuality studies. Her book Passionate and Pious: Religious Media and Black Women’s Sexuality was published by Duke University Press and was the 2018 Book of the Year for the Religious Communication Association. She has published extensively in journals and edited volumes, and her forthcoming research is a study of black lesbian religious leadership and faith activism. Her research has been supported by Harvard Divinity School’s Women’s Studies in Religion Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning Grants, a GSU Dean’s Early Career Award, and an American Academy of Religion Individual Research Grant.

Outside of the university, D. Moultrie was a consultant for the National Institutes of Health and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual. Transgender-Religious Archives Network. She is a Content Development working group member for the Columbia University’s Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice’s Scholars Group, a group of religious scholars collaborating at the intersection of religion and reproductive justice. Within the larger American Academy of Religion guild, Dr. Moultrie is the former Status of Women in the Profession Chair and a former co-chair of the Religion and Sexuality unit.

Sarah Emanuel is Assistant Professor of New Testament Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. She holds a PhD with Distinction in Biblical Studies, with a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, from Drew University’s Graduate Division of Religion. She received her M.A. in Religion from Wake Forest University, a graduate certificate in Ancient Jewish-Christian Encounters from Tel Aviv University International, and a B.A. in English and Liberal Studies from the University of Delaware, where was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and named a Woman of Promise.

Prior to joining the LMU faculty, Dr. Emanuel was Visiting Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at Colby College (2018-2020) and Visiting Assistant Professor of New Testament at Oberlin College (2017-2018). Dr. Emanuel’s research attends to the Jewishness of Christian origins, the relationship among text, culture, and identity, and the interplay between traditional historical-critical methodologies and contemporary critical theory (e.g., queer theory, trauma theory, humor theory). She is co-chair for the CoLaboratory at Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc., where she co-hosts the podcast, “Feminists Talk Religion.” She is also Content Area Editor of Biblical Studies at Ancient Jew Review. Some of Dr. Emanuel’s most recent publications include Humor, Resistance, and Jewish Cultural Persistence in the Book of Revelation: Roasting Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2020), “Grace Be to You in the Presence of the Past: Ghosts, Hauntings, and Traumatic Dissociations in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and the Gospel of John” (Gorgias Press, 2020), “On the Eighth Day, God Laughed: ‘Jewing’ Humor and Self-Deprecation in the Gospel of Mark and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2020), and “Letting Judges Breathe: Queer Survivance in the Book of Judges and Gad Beck’s An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin” (JSOT, 2020). She is also known to take students abroad whenever she can.

Dr. Emanuel is Slytherin Sun Hufflepuff Rising. When she’s not teaching or researching, she can be found training, surfing, cello-ing, and exploring California with her partner, Zoë, and their three best fluffs: Gus, Doug, and Finn.

Jordan Conley is a Ph.D candidate at Boston University, specializing in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. She graduated with a BA in Religion and Classics from the University of Puget Sound in 2009, and in 2014, she earned an MTS from Harvard Divinity School with a focus on New Testament and Early Christianity. Her research interests include ancient and late antique discourses of affliction, practices of incubation, and pilgrimage to healing sites.

Juliane Hammer is associate professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in the study of gender and sexuality in Muslim societies and communities, race and gender in US Muslim communities, as well as contemporary Muslim thought, activism and practice, and Sufism. She is the author of several books including Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence (2019); American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More Than a Prayer (2012), and Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland (2005). She is also the co-editor of A Jihad for Justice: The Work and Life of Amina Wadud (with K. Ali and L. Silvers, 2012); the Cambridge Companion to American Islam (with O. Safi, 2013), and Muslim Women and Gender Justice: Concepts, Sources, and Histories (with D. El Omari and M. Khorchide, 2020).

Naiara Leão is a Ph.D. student in Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean at the University of Iowa. She earned a B.A. in Communication Studies at the University of Brasília (Brazil) and an M.A. in History of Religions at the University of Lisbon (Portugal).

Naiara is from Brazil and has worked in Journalism and Publishing. Her research interests include prophecy, the role of orality and storytelling in early Christian groups and texts, Borderland feminist theory, and decolonial methodologies and approaches in Early Christian Studies.

Oluwatomisin Oredein is an Assistant Professor in Black Religious Traditions and Constructive Theology and Ethics and the Director of Black Church Studies at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, TX. Her scholastic work engages creative articulations of African feminist, womanist, postcolonial, and black theologies with particular attention to women’s voices within the African diaspora.

Kelsi Morrison-Atkins is a ThD candidate in New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Her dissertation explores the use of cultural ideologies of clothing, adornment, and bodily comportment in theological debates about gender, status, and authority in early Christian assemblies.

Susan Woolever is a doctoral candidate at Drew University in Christian Social Ethics. Her areas of interest include: feminist and childist ethics, trauma theory, Christian social ethics, religious ethics. Susan is also a trained mental health professional; her clinical work has focused on trauma therapy in the child and family welfare system, community mental health, and psychiatric hospitals. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Raritan Valley Community College and Pace University.

Elyse Ambrose, Ph.D. (she/her) is a black queer womxn.

As a black queer ethicist, creative, and educator, her research, community praxis, and art lie at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and spirituality. Ambrose’s desire for her scholarship to impact and be informed by real lives leads to her integration of theory and practice through phoeniXspark, LLC, where she works with individuals toward shaping ethical values and practices related to gender and sexuality.

Her most recent photo-sonic work, entitled “Spirit in the Dark Body: Black Queer Expressions of the Im/material,” premiered in November 2019 at the L Street Fine Arts Gallery (San Diego, CA) and has shown at the House of Mark West— one of the few black queer owned galleries in the country.

Ambrose currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethical Leadership and Society at Meadville Lombard Theological Seminary (Chicago, IL) as a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research has been supported by the Yale University Sarah Pettit Fund, the Forum for Theological Exploration, the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion, Columbia University’s Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice, the Henry Luce Foundation, Auburn Seminary and CrossCurrents Journal.

Ambrose’s work and commentary has been featured in the Huffington Post, the Christian Century, Medium, ForHarriet, Vice, and CBC Radio One’s Tapestry. She is also the curator and co-host of Black Queer Love, a podcast and social medium exploring relationships, sex, love, pop culture, life, healing, embodiment, and art from a black queer lens.

Elyse Ambrose is a graduate of Howard University (B.B.A, 2007), the Interdenominational Theological Center (M.Div., 2013) and Drew University (Ph.D., 2019). She is a native of New Orleans and currently resides in New York City and Chicago.

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