Archives: People

Dr. Brook Wilensky-Lanford holds a PhD in Religion in the Americas from UNC Chapel Hill. Her research interests include religion, race, and literature in the Long Reconstruction; ideas of utopia; and the entangled histories of religion and liberalism. The author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden on Earth, her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, The New Republic, and elsewhere. She is Associate Director of Sacred Writes Public Scholarship on Religion and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Donovan Schaefer joined the Department of Religious Studies as an assistant professor in 2017, after spending three years as a lecturer at the University of Oxford. He earned his B.A. in the interdisciplinary Religion, Literature, and the Arts program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His master’s and doctoral degrees are from the Religion program at Syracuse University. After completing his PhD, he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Haverford College. His research focuses on the role of embodiment and feeling in religion, science, material culture, and formations of the secular. His first book, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Duke 2015) challenged the notion that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, proposing instead that it is primarily driven by affects. His most recent book, Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke 2022) explores the intersections between affect theory, science, and critical approaches to the secular. In addition to his appointment in Religious Studies, he is Core Faculty in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and a member of the graduate group in Comparative Literature.

Anthea Butler is Geraldine R. Segal Professor in American Social Thought and chair of the department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A historian of African American and American religion, Professor Butler’s research and writing spans African American religion and history, race, politics, Evangelicalism, gender and sexuality, media, and popular culture. Her most recent book is White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, published by Ferris and Ferris/UNC Press. Prof Butler is the 2022 winner of the Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion from the American Academy of Religion. She currently serves as President of the American Society for Church history.

Jessica Johnson is a Visiting Scholar of Religious Studies at William & Mary. Her book on the rise and fall of Mars Hill Church, Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire, was published by Duke University Press in 2018.