People

Maytha Alhassen is a 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) and currently is a Senior Fellow at Pop Culture Collaborative.

Research Interests: cultural histories, social movements and friendships, race and ethnicity, social justice and the arts, travel, global flows, critical migration studies, women + gender, sacred femininities, media studies, Afro-Arab “solidarity politics,” Malcolm X, global south, food justice, and indigenous spiritual healing technologies and practices.

For almost 30 years, Dr. Toni Bond has worked tirelessly to make the voices of Black women heard around issues of reproductive and sexual health, rights, and justice. In 1994, Dr. Bond was one of the twelve Black women who gave birth to the concept of “Reproductive Justice,” creating a paradigm shift in how women of color would add their collective voices to the fight for reproductive autonomy and freedom. Reproductive justice was created to shed light on the combined forms of oppression that contribute to women of color’s reproductive oppression and as a systematic way to develop practical strategies of resistance and liberation.

In 1994, Dr. Bond was the first black woman appointed to serve as the executive director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, one of the oldest abortion funds in the Midwest. In 1996, she co-founded and led the first Black women’s reproductive justice organization in the country, Black Women for Reproductive Justice. Dr. Bond is a recognized leader and expert on working at the intersections of religion and reproductive justice. A womanist theo-ethicist, her areas of specialization include gender and sexuality, reproductive health, rights, and justice, Black feminist theory and methodology, womanist theory and methodology, and womanist and Christian ethics. Her scholarly foci are reproductive justice and women of color, religion, faith, and reproductive justice, and womanist theo-ethics and reproductive justice.

Keynotes and lectures Dr. Bond has given include the American Public Health Association, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, the American Academy of Religion, the Intercollegiate Feminist Center for Teaching, Research and Engagement at Scripps College, the National Abortion Federation, the International Cross-Cultural Black Women’s Studies Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa, the 10th International Women and Health Meeting in New Delhi, India, the National Convocation—Christian Church Disciples of Christ, and a NGO-sponsored session at the 2001 Third UN World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and other Forms of Intolerance in Durban, South Africa.  In December, 2008, Dr. Bond was part of a group of reproductive health, rights, and justice advocates invited to make recommendations to President Barack Obama’s transition team about advancing reproductive health and rights. Her testimony garnered her additional invitations from the Obama administration to participate in several White House meetings to share her insights about reducing unintended pregnancies.

Dr. Bond is the recipient of numerous awards, including, the Jane Bagley Lehman Fellowship from the Tides Foundation, the Pauli Murray Award from the Chicago Now Education Fund, the Bella Abzug Woman of Achievement Award from the Chicago Chapter of the National Organization of Women, and the Women in History Award from the Woman’s Board of the Chicago Urban League. In 2017, she received the Sharon Watson Fluker Doctoral Fellowship from the Forum for Theological Exploration. In support of her dissertation research, in 2019, Dr. Bond was named the inaugural Fellow for the Fellowship for Reproductive Justice Research, a research fellowship sponsored by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH), a collaborative research group at the University of California, San Francisco Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health. She was named the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at Interfaith Voices for Reproductive Justice. Dr. Bond also received the Emerging Scholars Award from the Society for Family Planning in support of her dissertation research. She was one of the 2019 fellows in the CrossCurrents Summer Research Colloquium at Auburn Seminary.

Dr. Bond currently serves as board chair of the board of directors for Interfaith Voices for Reproductive Justice. She is also on the board of the Civil Liberties & Public Policy Program. She has served on the boards and advisory committees of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, the Trust Black Women Partnership, the National Network of Abortion Funds, and the Guttmacher Institute.

Dr. Bond received her B.A. from DePaul University with a focus in Women & Gender Studies. She completed her M.A. in Theology/Ethics at Claremont School of Theology (CST), receiving their University Scholars Award, a fully funded scholarship. She completed her Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Society at CST.

Alejandro Escalante (PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill) is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at King’s College London. His work draws from Caribbean theory and philosophy and gender and sexuality studies, tracing the ways in which we make, re-make, and unmake ourselves as human through makeup and costuming. Inspired by the Jamaican philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter and French ethnographer Georges Bataille, his works seeks to understand how religious space can be utilized to refashion the self beyond “Man.” His work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Africana Religions, and Feminist Theology.

Midori E. Hartman is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Albright College. She holds a PhD in Historical Studies with an emphasis on Christianity in Late Antiquity from Drew University. Her primary research interests are Augustine of Hippo, ancient slavery, and rhetoric as it intersects with issues of gender, ethnicity, and animality.

Sharon Jacob is an Assistant Professor of New Testament at Pacific School of Religion. Sharon earned her Bachelors Degree in Accounting from Bangalore University and went on to earn her Masters of Divinity from Lancaster Theological Seminary and Masters of Sacred Theology from Yale University. She earned her Ph.D from Drew University. Her research interests include gender and sexuality studies, feminist theory, race and whiteness theory, and postcolonial theory. Her publications include a monograph entitled, Reading Mary alongside Indian Surrogate Mothers: Violent Love, Oppressive Liberation, and Infancy Narratives. She has also co-authored an essay entitled, “Flowing from breast to breast: An Examination of Dis/placed Motherhood in Black and Indian West Nurses,” in Womanist Biblical Interpretations: Expanding the Discourses published by Society of Biblical Literature Press.Sharon has also published an article in the Bangalore Theological Forum titled, “Reading Mary Alongside Indian Surrogate Mothers.” Her forthcoming essay is titled “Brown Men Saving Brown Women from White Culture: Nationalization of Rape Culture and the Ecologies of Sexual Violence,” this essay will appear in the edited volume Entangled Differences published by the Pennsylvania State University Press. Some of the courses that she has taught include: Reading the New Testament Through the Eyes of the Margins, Revelation: Then and Now, and Interpreting the Bible through Movement.

Read Sharon’s FSR Blog posts.

Alison L. Joseph is Senior 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 (Fortress, 2015), received the 2016 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. She is co-editor of Reading Other Peoples’ Texts: Social Identity and the Reception of Authoritative Traditions (Bloomsbury, 2020). 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.

Read Alison’s FSR Blog posts.

Dr. Yohana Junker is Assistant Professor of Art, Religion, and Culture at Claremont School of Theology and is a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Scholar. Her research probes the intersections among the fields of art history, eco-criticism, and decolonial studies, with special attention to contemporary Indigenous and diasporic art practices. In her writing, art, and activism, she explores the human capacity to imagine and retrieve generative ways of being even in the face of impossibility. She also investigates the ways artists create poetic spaces that allow viewers to come together, to reclaim agency and restore a sense of purpose, a thirst for justice, and a desire for transformation. Her artwork is central to her scholarship and activism.

Samira K. Mehta is an Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies and of Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Blended Family in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. Mehta’s current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in competing moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics from the mid-twentieth century to the present and is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. She is also working on a book of essays entitled The Racism of People Who Love You for Beacon Press.

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).

Angela N. Parker is the Assistant Professor of New Testament and Greek at McAfee. She received her B.A. in Religion & Philosophy from Shaw University (2008), her M.T.S. from Duke Divinity School (2008-2010) and her Ph.D. in Bible, Culture, & Hermeneutics (New Testament focus) from Chicago Theological Seminary (2015). Before this position, Dr. Parker was Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology for 4 years. While at The Seattle School, Dr. Parker received the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion’s ESF New Scholar Award (2^nd Place) for her article “One Womanist’s View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians.” She teaches courses in New Testament, Greek Exegesis, the Gospel of Mark, the Corinthians Correspondence, and the Gospel of John. She is also working on a new course that engages womanist and feminist hermeneutics unto preaching.

In 2021, Dr. Parker’s book entitled If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I: Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority is slated for release by Eerdmans Publishing. In this work, Dr. Parker argues that the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility serve as tools of White supremacist authoritarianism. In another forthcoming book entitled Bodies, Violence, & Emotions: A Womanist Study of the Gospel of Mark, Dr. Parker thinks through the issue of imperial violence and its effects on the bodies of Jesus, John the Baptizer, and the woman suffering in a flow of blood in Mark 5. This study allows Dr. Parker to engage real lived experiences of violence and emotions in contemporary society. Dr. Parker is also the author of articles entitled “Reading Mary Magdalene with Stacey Abrams,” “Feminized-Minoritized Paul? A Womanist Reading of Paul’s Body in 1 Corinthians,” and “And the Word Became. . . Gossip? Unhinging the Samaritan Woman in the Age of #MeToo.”

In addition to her teaching and research, Dr. Parker serves as co-chair for the Paul & Politics Seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature and is a committee member of SBL’s Feminist Hermeneutics of the Bible as well as a committee member of the American Academy of Religion’s Status of Racial and Ethnic Minorities Committee.

Michal Raucher an assistant professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. Her research lies at the intersection of Israel studies, Jewish ethics, and the anthropology of women in Judaism. As a Fulbright Fellow, Dr. Raucher conducted ethnographic research on reproductive ethics of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish women in Israel. She has been awarded grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation for anthropological research, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Crown Family Foundation. Drawing on this research, Michal will publish her first book, Birthing Ethics: Reproductive Ethics among Haredi Women in Jerusalem with Indiana University Press in 2020.

Professor Raucher’s second book is titled Tapping on the Stained Glass Ceiling: the Ordination of Orthodox Jewish Women in Israel and America. This book surrounds the recent ordination of women in Orthodoxy, comparing the phenomenon in Israel and America. Research for this book has been supported by the Israel Institute, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the American Academy of Religion, and the University of Cincinnati. Michal has also published on sexuality and gender in Judaism, religion and bioethics, abortion legislation in Israel, and female religious advisors on the Internet.

Dr. Raucher has been an assistant professor of Israel and Modern Jewish Thought in the Department of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati, a fellow at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and a visiting scholar at the Hastings Center, and Yale University’s Center for Bioethics. She has consulted for the United Nations Population Fund, where she worked with colleagues from around the world on improving reproductive and sexual rights and health for women and children. Michal earned her PhD in Religious Studies with a concentration in religious ethics and anthropology from Northwestern University. She has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania in Bioethics, and graduated from the Joint Program with The Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University, earning a BA in Hebrew Bible and a BA in Religion.

Read Michal’s FSR Blog posts.

Tamisha A. Tyler, MDiv, is the former Director of ARC: Art Religion and Culture and PhD candidate in theology and culture. Her work establishes methodologies in the field of Theopoetics, situated in the work of Octavia Butler. Tamisha is also cofounder of Kinship Commons, a company that resources worship cultivators of color. A dynamic speaker and facilitator, she teaches in the areas of culture, community, and art, and works with several organizations including Level Ground, Feminism and Religion, and currently serves as a faculty and board member of Grunewald Guild. We’re not working, she enjoys good food and good friends, karaoke, and travel.

Karri Whipple is Faculty Fellow of Global Works and Society at New York University Liberal Studies. She earned her PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity from Drew University (2018). Her research interests include queer hermeneutics, postcolonial trauma theory, womanist-feminist dialogical interpretation, and critical race theory. Whipple is committed to working on issues of gender-based violence, gender justice, and media rights with nonprofits and NGOs across New York City and the United Nations.