Luce cOHORTS

With our second round of funding from the Henry Luce Foundation, we are sponsoring 4 rounds of our three-month public scholarship training program online, for scholars focused on “race, justice, and religion” in public scholarship, funded by a grant from the Henry R. Luce Foundation. These public scholars are listed alphabetically by cohort below.

FAll 2023

Corwin Davis

Emory University

Corwin Malcolm Davis is a PhD candidate at Emory University in Person, Community, and Religious Life, and earning a certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Corwin earned a B.A. Degree from Belmont University and a M.Div. from Vanderbilt University Divinity School as the Dean's Scholar. At Emory, Davis has received the George W. Woodruff Fellowship, the Centennial Scholars Fellowship, and externally, fellowships from the Louisville Institute and the Forum for Theological Exploration. His work has also been recognized in scholarship through the receipt of Emory’s 2022 Studies in Sexualities Graduate Award, and in public writing through features in literary publications such as Columbia Journal.

Sarah Dees

Iowa state university

Sarah Dees is a scholar of American and Indigenous religions and assistant professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on the history of the study and representation of Native North American religious traditions, including the relationship between the production of knowledge about religion and policies limiting the free exercise of religion. Her first book manuscript examines the study of Native American religions in the assimilation era by a Smithsonian research agency. She has taught classes on American religions, Native American religions, religion and museums, method and theory in the study of religion, religious freedom and discrimination, and religion and health. She is also interested the intersections of religion, culture, art, and music. You can see what she’s up to at www.sarahedees.com.

Antavius franklin

fordham university

Antavius Franklin (he/him/his) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Theology Department at Fordham University, focusing on Systematic Theology. He earned his ThM and M.Div. at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and his B.S. in Social Science and Psychology at Upper Iowa University. His research explores the intersection of black religious studies, contemporary southern studies, sound studies, and black studies. More particularly, through an engagement of the work of southern hip hop group Outkast, he contends with the ways in which black sonic and aesthetic practices of the post-civil rights south attend to material realities, cultural production, and religious sensibilities which inform black subject formation in the American South.

chauncey handy

reed college

Chauncey Handy is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Reed College. As a Chicano scholar of the Hebrew Bible, Chauncey’s work focuses on the intersection of race/racialization, theories of ethnicity, Latinx theorization of identity, and the reception history of the Hebrew Bible (for example his Bible, Race, and Empire course at Reed). He earned his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Reed College. He is working on turning his dissertation, Mestizo Poetics of Belonging: Deuteronomy’s Construction of Israelite Ethnicity, into a published book. In this project, he considers the nature of ethnicity as presented in the text of Deuteronomy through the lens of Gloria Anzaldúa’s articulation of mestizaje (racial-ethnic intermixture). His argument emphasizes the value of socially located approaches to Hebrew Bible and seeks to theorize engagement with religious categories of belonging that advocate for a just society.

Inaash islam

st. michael’s college

Inaash Islam (she/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Saint Michael’s College. Her research focuses on the post-9/11 implications of anti-Muslim racism, gendered racialization, and Islamic feminism in the lives of diasporic Muslim women in America. Her current book project examines the experience of unveiling/taking off the hijab among formerly-hijabi Muslimah Americans, and illustrates the ways by which Muslim women are employing Islamic feminisms in their everyday lives. She also has a forthcoming co-authored book on global anti-Muslim racism with Dr. Saher Selod and Dr. Steve Garner entitled A Global Racial Enemy: Muslims and 21st-Century Racism, and has published her research in Du Bois Review, Feminist Formations, and the Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research.

samira mehta

university of colorado boulder

Samira Mehta is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and Jewish Studies at CU Boulder. Her research focuses on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the US. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (UNC, 2018) was a National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her book of personal essays, The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023) was called “the epitome of a book meeting a moment” by Oprah’s “Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2023.” Mehta’s current academic book project, God Bless the Pill: Sexuality and Contraception in Tri-Faith America examines the role of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant voices in moral logics of contraception, population control, and eugenics in the mid-twentieth century. Mehta is the primary investigator for a Luce Foundation funded project, Jews of Color: Histories and Futures.

Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry

loyola university chicago

Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry is an historian of religion and ritual at Loyola University Chicago. He has a focus on Indigenous traditions of Mesoamerica, the early modern period, and trans-Atlantic colonialism and is interested in the formation of religious categories and their intersections with Native ceremonial practices as they appeared in material culture and Indigenous-language texts. He has collaborated on an open access Nahuatl curriculum created by Nahuatl-speakers Sabina Cruz de la Cruz and Catalina Cruz de la Cruz. His current monograph, Give Drink to the Sun, questions the limits of applying Eurocentric theories of religion on Indigenous ceremonies. It demonstrates that household ritual specialists were official participants in the life cycles of the city-states, before and after European occupation. His approaches embrace multidisciplinary methods, from archeology to ethnohistory and pictorial documentation, and natural anthropologies from the medieval and early modern periods.

Ashlyn Strozier

Georgia State University

Dr. Strozier is a lecturer at Georgia State University. She is continuing her research in the areas of religion, gender, sexuality, and health focusing the disproportionality of black women's maternal mortality, and women's reproductive decisions, using digital platforms. Her pedagogical focus is anti-racist and decolonial teaching strategies, while shifting humanities curriculum to focus on professional skill development within the gaze of critical skills. Dr. Strozier is dedicated to research and teaching as forms of activism.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Public scholarship cohort selected; training scheduled