a bit about me.
I joined the Religion Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign as an Assistant Professor in 2023. Prior to that, I held two postdoctoral fellowships. My research and teaching interests include social ethics, religion & politics in the US, political theology, moral formation, complicity and responsibility, and structural injustice. I am especially interested in moral and political questions concerning schooling, policing and prisons, and borders and migration.
My dissertation, Making Citizens in a Credential Society: Identities, Values, and Practices at Brooklyn High, is an ethnographic study of civic and moral formation at a Title I public high school in Brooklyn, NY. I am currently working on several projects based off of that fieldwork.
my work around incarceration.
The vast expansion of the prison-industrial complex has meant that along with half of Americans, I have immediate family members who have experienced incarceration. During my Ph.D. program, I managed an inside-outside certificate program where students from the community joined students incarcerated at Garden State Correctional Facility to learn together.
At UIUC, I am a member of the Advisory Council for the Education Justice Project (EJP). EJP is a vibrant community of incarcerated students, educators, formerly incarcerated individuals, and others who are committed to a more just and humane world. We believe that providing quality post-secondary education within prisons is an important step towards that vision. Click below to learn more about EJP.