Provost Professor, Religious Studies
Affiliate Professor, Law, Maurer School of Law
Director, Center for Religion and the Human
I am interested in religion as a broad and complex social and cultural phenomenon, one that is deeply entangled with law. My particular research focus is in understanding the phenomenology of religion under the modern rule of law. I have training in law and in religious studies and have taught both in law school and in religious studies departments. I practiced law after graduating from law school before returning to graduate school to study religion. My training in the academic study of religion is in two fields, American religious history and the comparative study of religion. I focus on the intersection of religion and law in the U.S. within a broader comparative field, both theoretically and cross-culturally. Within legal studies, my work falls broadly within socio-legal and critical legal studies.
I am the author of four books analyzing legal discourses about religion in the context of actions brought to enforce the religion clauses of the First Amendment and related legislation: Paying the Words Extra: Religious Discourse in the Supreme Court of the United States (Harvard 1994), The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton 2005), Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton 2009), and Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (Chicago 2020). Each of these books offers a close reading of the texts of a US religion case using the resources of legal anthropology, socio-legal studies and the academic study of religion, with a view to displaying the multiple and contending models of and discourses about religion there represented. My goal in each case was to situate and critique American law about religion, setting that law in the context of American religious and legal history, and the scholarship about them. My fourth book, A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care, and the Law (Chicago 2014), portrays the chaplain and her ministry as a product of the legal regulation of religion and as a form of spiritual governance. A co-authored work, Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State (with Paul Johnson and Pamela Klassen) (Chicago 2018), examines the peculiarities of the intersection of church and state across the Americas. A forthcoming co-authored book considers the religiousness of the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard: The Abyss, or Life is Simple (Chicago 2022). I am also co-editor of five volumes, After Secular Law (Stanford 2011), Varieties of Religious Establishment (Ashgate 2013), Politics of Religious Freedom (Chicago 2015), Theologies of American Exceptionalism (Indiana 2020), and At Home and Abroad: The Politics of American Religion (Columbia 2021).
At Indiana I teach courses on religion and law, the politics of religious freedom, the history and phenomenology of Christmas as a church/state event, the trial of Joan of Arc, and contemporary theories of religion.
Contributors: Courtney Bender, Jeremy Biles, Liane Carlson, Joshua Dubler, Hannah C. Garvey, Erik Thorstensen, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Cooper Harriss
2022
Edited by: Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd
2020
Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Saba Mahmood, Peter G. Danchin
2015
Review Article. Carlo Ginsburg and Bruce Lincoln, Old Thiess and Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner. Journal of the American Academy of Religion (September 2020)
“Law and Religion: Re-imagining the entanglement of two universals.” (with Mona Oraby) Annual Review of Law and Social Science 16 (2020): 1-20.
“Being Human: Negotiating Religion, Law, and Science in the Classroom and the Courtroom” in Elizabeth Mertz, William K. Ford, and Gregory Matoesian, eds., Translating the Social World for Law: Linguistic Tools for a New Legal Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)
“Imagining Law at the Newark Earthworks” for Lindsay Jones, et al, eds., The Newark Earthworks and World Heritage: One Site, Many Contexts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2015)
“Sex and the Catholic Church: What does law have to do with it? Introduction”
“Is Masterpiece Cakeshop a Church?” The Immanent Frame
Book symposium: https://politicaltheology.com/symposium/from-the-sovereign-to-the-church/
Book forum: https://tif.ssrc.org/category/book-blog/book-forums/church-state-corporation/
“President Trump Visits St. John’s Church” The Immanent Frame https://tif.ssrc.org/2020/06/04/president-trump-visits-st-johns-church/ (posted June 4, 2020)
“human” for A Universe of Terms at The Immanent Frame https://tif.ssrc.org/2020/03/13/human-sullivan/ (posted March 13, 2020)
“Jesus in the bardo” at The Immanent Frame (posted December 20, 2017)
“Teaching Religion: Refusing the Schempp Myth of Origins" The Immanent Frame (posted 15 August 2016)
The College of Arts