Center Affiliates
Eman Abdelhadi
Eman Abdelhadi is a mixed-methods scholar studying gender, migration, and religion, with a substantive interest in Muslim Americans. Her qualitative work examines the interplay between community and identity among Muslim migrants, and her quantitative work uses survey data analysis to ascertain how religion intersects with economic and cultural outcomes. Abdelhadi received her PhD in Sociology from New York University in 2019, and she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.
Feyza Akova
Feyza Akova is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to joining Notre Dame, Feyza earned an M.A. in Sociology from University of Houston and B.A. degrees in Sociology and Psychology from the University of Istanbul. Feyza has won several teaching and research awards, including the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS) 2022 Excellence in Teaching Award and the Robert J. McNamara Student Paper Award from the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Her dissertation project, “Journeys to Traditional Sufi Islam in America: Self-transcendence, Tradition, and Social Change in the Contemporary Modern World,” received Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
Shaonta’ Allen
Shaonta’ Allen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College where she also holds affiliations with the African and African American Studies Department and the Consortium of Studies in Race, Migration, and Sexuality. Her scholarship draws on Race, Social Movements, Religion, and Intersectionality literatures to explore Black political ideologies and behaviors, assessing how they vary across social locations and institutional contexts. Shay's current projects explore the experiences of Black Christian Millennials during Black Lives Matter and the religious politics of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Her research and reviews have been published in Social Problems, Sociology Compass, Humanity & Society, and Religions. Visit ShaontaTheSociologist.com to learn more.
Roger Baumann
Roger Baumann is an assistant professor of sociology and director of peace and justice studies at Hope College. His research and teaching focus on questions about collective identity and social action. He is especially interested in how overlapping racial, religious, and national identities contribute to how members of religious groups collectively understand who they are, where they come from, and what they should be doing in the world. His book, Black Visions of the Holy Land (Columbia University Press, 2024), analyzes African American Christian engagement with the global issue of Israel and Palestine. It examines how different groups of Black Christians invoke and contest the identity, history, and mission of “the Black Church” as they approach the conflict. Another recent project, American Evangelicals, Islam, and the Competition for Religious Authority, analyzes hundreds of books written by and for evangelical Christians about Islam and Muslims in the last half century, considering the religious, political, and social significance of American evangelical struggles over the authority to define Islam and Muslims.
Janna Hunter-Bowman
Janna L. Hunter-Bowman is Associate Professor of Peace Studies and Christian Social Ethics and Director of Peace Studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, In. Her first book Witnessing Peace: Becoming Agents Under Duress in Colombia (Routledge 2022) is rooted in 10 years of peacebuilding and research in Latin America. Additional publications include essays in the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, Political Theology, the Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, and Mennonite Quarterly Review. Her research and teaching interests occur at the intersection of international peace studies, peace theology, political theology, action research, ethnographically driven theology, and Latin American critical studies. Her second book-length project focuses on undocumented immigrants in the United States as agents under duress. Louisville Institute’s Sabbatical Grant for Researchers supports this project titled “Beyond sanctuary: new orientations for church support of immigrants.” She received her PhD from the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Theology Department at the University of Notre Dame.
Khari Brown
Dr. R. Khari Brown is a sociology professor at Wayne State University. He teaches classes and does research on the sociology of religion. His research explores how race impacts the relationship between religion and social-political behaviors and attitudes. He is a co-investigator of National Politics Study, a project funded by the Louisville Institute, the Issachar Fund, and the University of Michigan. The National Politics Study is a bi-annual study that assesses American political attitudes and behaviors and religious life. He also was the 2021/2022 President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.
Tricia Bruce
Tricia C. Bruce (PhD, University of California Santa Barbara) is a sociologist of religion who researches Catholicism and the contours of organizational and attitudinal change. Her award-winning books and reports include Parish and Place; Faithful Revolution; American Parishes; Polarization in the US Catholic Church; and How Americans Understand Abortion (cited in the Washington Post, Atlantic, Commonweal, and more). Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Science Advances, Review of Religious Research, U.S. Catholic Historian, and elsewhere. Dr. Bruce serves as Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Section and council member for the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Personal website: triciabruce.com.
Katie Comeau
Research Interests: Religion, Organizations, Development, Theory
Shanna Corner
Research Interests: Global and transnational sociology, cultural sociology, political culture, human rights, law and society, gender, religion, intergovernmental organizations, comparative-historical sociology
Michael Emerson
Research Interests: Race and Ethnic Relations, Religion, Urban, and Methods
Jacqui Frost
Jacqui Frost is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. She is a mixed-methods scholar whose research integrates cultural sociology, sociology of religion, science and technology studies, and sociology of health. Most broadly, her work investigates the causes and consequences of religious disaffiliation in the United States. She is currently working on projects that examine conceptions of ritual and community in nonreligious congregations, the ways religious change shapes health and wellbeing, and conceptions of science as sacred in the transhumanist movement. Her recent research has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Poetics, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. You can learn more about Jacqui's research at jacquifrost.com.
Slavica Jakelić
Slavica Jakelić is the Richard P. Baepler Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Valparaiso University. Her scholarly interests and publications center on religion and nationalism, religious and secular humanisms, theories of religion and secularism, theories of modernity, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. Jakelić has worked at or was a fellow of a number of interdisciplinary institutes in Europe and the United States—the Erasmus Institute for the Culture of Democracy in Croatia; the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University; the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna; the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago; the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study; the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame; the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School, and Yale Divinity School. She is a Senior Fellow of the national project “Religion & Its Publics,” placed at the University of Virginia, where she was a faculty member and co-director at the UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for several years. She is also a Senior Fellow of the international project "Orthodoxy and Human Rights," placed at Fordham University.
Jason Klocek
Jason Klocek is Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political violence and repression, with particular attention to the role of religion. His current book project explores how counterinsurgents construe and respond to religious rebellions with an empirical focus on British insurgency wars during the early postwar period. He has also written on the determinants and effects of religious minority discrimination, religious violence, strategic religious peacebuilding, and intersectional stereotyping in political decision making. His work has appeared in the Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Religions, and Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies, among other outlets. From 2020-2025, he served as a Senior Researcher with the religion and inclusive societies team at the United States Institute of Peace. Visit http://www.jasonklocek.com to learn more.
Brie Loskota
Brie Loskota spent her career leading research centers at the intersection of religion and public life including serving as the inaugural executive director of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago and executive director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. Her research explores how religions change and make change in the world. In addition, she spent over a decade as an implementation partner and contractor at the United State Institute of Peace where she trained leaders committed to peace-building and public engagement around the globe.
Loskota works with local, state and federal government agencies to ensure more effective partnership with faith communities on issues including public health, mental health, and disaster response. She co-authored the first Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) training curriculum on engaging faith communities in disasters and 16 tip sheets aimed at increasing religious competency in disaster response. She co-edited a religious literacy primer for disaster response and a field guide for faith community engagement for emergency management and public health officials. She co-authored guidelines for mass care of religious minorities that was adopted by the American Red Cross. These materials are part of the Disasters and Religions app that Loskota co-created which includes a multifaith chaplaincy prayers compendium.
She has been a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, served on the CFR Religion Advisory Committee, a Truman National Security Fellow, a German Marshall Memorial Foundation Fellow, and fellow at the Safe Communities Institute at USC. The World Economic Forum named Loskota a Young Global Leader in 2017 and she was appointed as a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council on Faith in Action for 2025-27. In 2020, she was elected to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s Council for a three-year term, and chaired SSSR’s communications committee.
Ricardo Martinez-Schuldt
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. Generally, my research examines how local contexts shape human behavior and institutional actions in the areas of criminology and international migration. My current research, for example, considers the impact of immigrant “sanctuary” policies, immigration, and non-profit organizations on city-level violence as well as their effects on the likelihood that individuals report crime victimization to law enforcement officials.
Tryce Prince
Tryce Prince is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC), where he studies how race shapes individual experiences, social spaces, and intergroup relations. His dissertation explores the relevance of W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of "second-sight" in contemporary Black religious life. He is the co-author of “Religion and Race: A Double-Edged Sword,” which appears in Religion Matters: What Sociology Teaches Us About Religion In Our World (2022).
Roberta Ricucci
Roberta Ricucci is Full Professor of Sociology of Migration and Sociology of Islam at the University of Turin (IT). She focuses her research on youth, education and religious pluralism management in the framework of migratory processes, publishing internationally on how local societies, human mobilities and intercultural dynamics intertwine. These studies are united by her abiding interest in improving public awareness of sociological findings, as is certified by her selection as an expert in migration studies by the UN. Combining her activity in Italy with long periods spent in universities around the world, from Europe to America to Australia, has developed a cross-disciplinary approach as well an adaptability towards working in various academic and cultural contexts. She has coordinated several international projects on migratory issues, religious pluralism and education in diaspora contexts.
Bridget Ritz
Interests: Culture, Religion, Science, Pragmatism, Critical Realism, Qualitative Methods
Michael Skaggs
Research Interests: History of American religion
Meredith Whitnah
Meredith Whitnah graduated from Gordon College with a major in gender studies through the Kenneth L Pike Honors Program. She earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in sociology at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in gender, religion, culture and social theory. She studies the role of religion in both perpetuating and mitigating different forms of social inequality, and is particularly interested in how organizations form responses to social issues. Her current book project, forthcoming with Rutgers University Press, is titled “Faith and the Fragility of Justice: Responses to Gender-Based Violence in South Africa.” This historical study investigates how faith-based NGOs in South Africa that had resisted apartheid have also addressed gender-based violence. The book will be available in April 2025.
Daniel Winchester
Daniel Winchester is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University with expertise in the areas of religion, culture, social theory, and qualitative methods (particularly ethnography). Most broadly, his scholarship focuses on answering questions about how culture shapes human subjectivity and action, with particular attention paid to the field of American religion. Among other research projects, Dan has conducted ethnographic studies of religious conversions to Islam and Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the United States and is currently writing a book entitled The World is a Mission Field based on several years of research on the subculture of evangelical mission mobilization (aka missionary recruitment). His research has appeared in journals such as Social Forces, Theory & Society, Sociological Theory, Sociology of Religion, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and received awards from the Religion, Culture, and Theory Sections of the American Sociological Association.
Michael Wood
Michael Lee Wood is an assistant professor of Sociology at Brigham Young University. He completed his PhD in Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. Michael is a cultural sociologist with special interests in cognition, religion, and computational methods. He studies the cultural and social dynamics that affect reasoning and behavior (including parenting decisions and church attendance) and develops computational tools for measuring culture.
Simone Zhang
Simone Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University. Her research examines what people get out of their encounters with local organizations and community institutions.