Carpenter Cohort: Summer training

In 2025, Sacred Writes has received a second round of funding from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation to hold public scholarship trainings for scholars focused on religion, gender, and sexuality. Please welcome the scholars accepted to the Summer Training!

Claudia Alvarez

Princeton Theological Seminary

Claudia Alvarez is a second-year PhD student at Princeton Theological Seminary in the Religion and Society program. Originally from Colombia and with previous studies in sociology and gender studies, Claudia moved to the U.S. four years ago to pursue a Master of Divinity at Boston University School of Theology, with the goal of exploring Queer and Feminist theologies as tools for social transformation and resistance. Her PhD project seeks to illuminate how LGBTQ+ Inclusive Pentecostal churches are queering the Pentecostal movement in Latin America, contributing to broader conversations about how Queer Christians of the Global South are reshaping this tradition by prophetically denouncing the religious harm inflicted upon them and infusing new life and witness into the church.

Esther brownsmith

university of dayton

Esther Brownsmith (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Dayton. Her first monograph, Gendered Violence in Biblical Narrative: The Devouring Metaphor (Routledge, 2024), was awarded the AJS Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. She is also editor-in-chief of Unruly Books: Rethinking Ancient and Academic Imaginations of Religious Texts (Bloomsbury, 2025), and her recent publications examine the book of Esther in the light of fan fiction studies, queer theory, and affect theory. Her research focuses on the stories of the Hebrew Bible and the cultural and literary norms that make them so resonant. Her latest project applies Sara Ahmed's "feminist killjoy" to the women of the Hebrew Bible, using biblical stories of unhappy women as a model for modern unhappy readers.

samantha carwyn

metropolitan community churches

Samantha Carwyn is a graduate of United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, where she earned a Master of Divinity with a concentration in Social Transformation and Church Leadership. Her thesis, Finding Sacred Inherent Worth Despite Adultification & Misogynoir, explores the intersections of gender, race, and the societal expectations placed on Black women. She is currently in care for ordination with the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches. In her community, Samantha engages in transformative resistance through education, storytelling, and artivism. As a public theologian, she is committed to building bridges between the church, academia, and everyday people to cultivate meaningful conversations.

Jimmy Hoke

United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities

Jimmy Hoke is a freelance scholar whose uses their research, writing, and teaching to enact genuine change. Their work engages and creates queer, trans, and feminist approaches to the New Testament and Early Christianity. They are the author of Feminism, Queerness, Affect, and Romans: Under God?, which reconstructs how queer wo/men engaged with impulses in Paul’s letters. They are the Treasurer of Feminist Studies in Religion, Inc. and teach courses at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Their current research and writing projects include exploring asexuality in first-century Judaism and Christianity, exploring the intersections of queerness and disability in the gospels, and reexamining the rhetoric of “sluttiness” in Paul’s letters.

Paulinha Landim Nazare

Federal University of Juiz de Fora

Paulina Landim Nazare is an attorney currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Religious Studies at UFJF. She earned her law degree from Faculdades Integradas Vianna Junior (2014), and holds specializations in Labor Law and Procedure from Faculdade Damásio (2020), Civil Advocacy from ESA Nacional/Faculty of Law of the Fundação Escola Superior do Ministério Público do Rio Grande do Sul (2023), and Agribusiness Law from Faculdade Legale (2023). A member of the OAB (Brazilian Bar Association), she currently works as an attorney and consultant in the areas of Environmental, Occupational Health and Safety, and Religious Freedom.

Lauren mcCormick

Princeton university

Lauren K. McCormick is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University's Center for Culture, Society, and Religion. A scholar of the biblical world, she uses imaging technology to detect and reconstruct paint on ancient artifacts. McCormick earned her PhD in religious studies from Syracuse University in 2023, after obtaining a Bachelor's degree from Rutgers University and Master's degrees from New York University and Duke University. With Sacred Writes, she will develop an online teaching module exploring conceptions of gender in the biblical past.

Ramisuddeen Vypukaran Muhammed Mansoor

Leibniz University Hannover

Ramisuddeen is an early-career researcher and Master’s student in Religion in the Public Sphere at Leibniz University Hannover. He holds a Bachelor’s in Arabic Language and Literature (Mahatma Gandhi University, India) and an MA and MPhil in Islamic Studies (University of Madras, India). MPhil dissertation has been done on the topic ‘The dialectics of secularism and Islamophobia in contemporary India’ under Dr. PK Abdul Rahiman. His academic focus lies at the intersection of decoloniality, Muslim political imaginations, and minority discourses in post-colonial contexts. Aspiring to pursue a PhD, Ramisuddeen aims to contribute to global scholarly conversations on decolonial thought, Muslim agency, and the political imagination of the Muslim populace in global south.