Department of Religious Studies

I am the postdoctoral fellow in IUB’s Center for Religion and the Human’s (CRH). In this role, I work both in CRH and the Department of Religious Studies developing pedagogy practices of graduate students teaching religion in the complex and often changing atmosphere of this public university atmosphere. One of my current projects is as co-collaborator with Constance Furey on the Teaching Religion in Public initiative, facilitating occasions for students and faculty to practice and reflect on teaching as a collective activity. As I begin this two-year position, I will focus on developing resources and spaces for upcoming and current instructors of religion to hone their skills. In academic year 2025–26, I will teach courses in the Department of Religious Studies. 

My research focuses on religion and textuality in the United States, with particular attention to race, aesthetics, and constructions of the human. My dissertation, “Opacity & The Strange Meaning of Being Black,” read together charts created by W.E.B. Du Bois for the 1900 World’s Fair, the interactions between a white cat and Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son, and a strange set of encounters between white women and the protagonist of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison to argue for opacity as a functional and aesthetic mode of religion in visual and literary creations. Building on the theoretical work of Martinican writer and poet Édouard Glissant and historian of religion Charles H. Long, my work is invested in challenging structures of knowledge and being that demand transparency as a basis of knowledge and of being (human) in relation. During my postdoc, I will be focused on developing this dissertation in a variety of ways for future publication.