American religions; gender and sexuality, in particular queer studies; history of race and racism; history or disability.

Most of my research focuses on the power of religious discourse. I explore how religious vocabularies have helped to produce and to shape social forms of difference—gender, sexuality, race, disability. I am especially drawn to religious lives that have been obscured or erased through those discursive processes, and I search for counter-discourses that minoritized religious actors have developed to resist or to cope with violence of various kinds. In studying the strategies of those minoritized religious actors, I seek to better understand the powers they confront.

My first book project, tentatively titled Born Again Queer, recovers the history of an evangelical gay activist network in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. Through an analysis of this network’s surprising successes, the evangelical opposition that it aroused in the late 1970s, and the subsequent erasure of its history, Born Again Queer demonstrates, against both scholarly and popular accounts, that evangelical discourse on homosexuality in this period was contested, variable, and vulnerable. Beyond the context of evangelicalism in the twentieth-century United States, the book calls for scholars to more rigorously historicize religious anti-LGBTQ+ positions.

American Academy of Religion, American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, American Society of Church History

Graduate Research Fellowship, Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, Princeton University, 2021–2023

Graduate Teaching Award, Department of Religion, Princeton University, 2021–2022

Religion and Public Life Fellowship, Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University, 2020–2021

LGBTQ Religious History Award, LGBTQ Religious Archives Network, 2020–2021 Honorable Mention

“Guess Who’s Coming to Church: The Chicago Defender, the Federal Council of Churches, and Rethinking Shared Faith in Interracial Religious Practice,” Church History (forthcoming, fall 2023).

Review Essay: Joseph Plaster, Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Duke University Press, 2023), Monique Moultrie, Hidden Histories: Faith and Black Lesbian Leadership (Duke University Press, 2023), and Katrina Daly Thompson, Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America (NYU Press, 2023) for American Religion (forthcoming, winter 2023).

“From Neighbors to Outcasts: Evangelical Gay Activism in the Late 1970s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 31, no. 3 (September 2022): 335–360.

“Queerly Evangelical: The Rhetoric of Inverted Belonging as a Challenge to Heteronormativity in Evangelical Theology,” Theology & Sexuality 25, no. 1–2 (2019): 62–80.

Besides my first book project, I am working on several articles and planning for several conferences. Nearly completed is an article on Deaf religious practice and hearing Protestants’ concerns about it in the nineteenth-century United States. Partially completed is an article that theorizes what I call “compulsory metropolitanism” in antiqueer religious discourses, expanding on Adrienne Rich’s concept of compulsory heterosexuality and Jack Halberstam’s concept of metronormativity. Among my conference presentations planned for the 2023–2024 academic year are three panels that I have organized: an author-meets-critics session on Isaac Sharp’s new book The Other Evangelicals for the American Academy of Religion; “Disabling Religion: How People with Disabilities Shaped American Christian Communities” for the American Society of Church History; and “Queer Spirits of New Orleans” for the Organization of American Historians.

My second book project, like my first, will examine queer religious movements. I am in the beginning stages of research for a history of queer ordination activism across Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant traditions in the United States.