Richard Wentz

Inés Talamantez

Inés Talamantez is Associate Professor of Native American Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and managing editor of New Scholar: An Americanist Review.  She has done extensive fieldwork in the Southwest and has directed the Society for the Study of Native American Religious Traditions.  She is a frequent lecturer at conferences and universities. Her major research interests are Native American female initiation ceremonies and Native American attitudes toward the environment. Her book Isánáklésh Gotal: Introducing Apache Girls to the World of Spiritual and Cultural Values is in press.

Laurie Maffly-Kipp has been at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1989, where she is now an associate professor in the religious studies department and also holds a joint appointment in the American studies curriculum. She received her B.A. from Amherst College in English and religion, and her Ph.D. in American history from Yale University. Her first book, Religion and Society in Frontier California (1994), dealt with evangelical missionary efforts during the California gold rush.  Maffly-Kipp's current research focuses on intercultural conflict, with special focuses on African-American religions and religions on the Pacific borderlands of America.  Since then she has published several articles that deal with Mormon growth, Protestant missions, and American colonial expansion in the nineteenth century.

Tisa Wenger

Tisa Wenger, Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Arizona State University, specializes in the histories of gender, race, and cultural encounter in nineteenth and twentieth century American religion. Her current book project, The Pueblo Dance Controversy and the Cultural Invention of Religion in America, addresses religious freedom and the historical construction of Native American religion. Her second book will consider the role of Protestant home missions in constructing notions of race in the American West. She is co-convener of the "Through the Lens of Race and Ethnicity" project.

Moses Moore

Dr. Moses N. Moore, Jr. received a doctorate in Church History from Union Theological Seminary and is an Associate Professor of American and African American Religious History at Arizona State University. He has taught at St. Peter’s College; William and Mary; and the University of Missouri-Columbia. Published works have focused on the relationship between West African and Diaspora African religious communities in the Caribbean, South and North America (Orishatukeh Faduma: Liberal Theology and Evangelical Pan-Africanism;“Edward Blyden and the Presbyterian Mission in Liberia”; and “A Trans-Atlantic Relationship: Orishatukeh Faduma and the AME Church in Sierra Leone”) and the historiography of the evangelical reform movement (“’Righteous Exalts a Nation;’ Black Presbyterians and the Evangelical Reform Movement” and “History and Historiography: Revisiting the Presbyterian Schism of 1837”). He is currently completing a biography of Edward Wilmot Blyden titled “’Minister of Truth’: The Religious Odyssey and Legacy of Edward Wilmot Blyden.”

Current research pertaining to religion in the American West includes studies of African Americans and the American Missionary Association in Texas and the intersections of race, religion, and gender in the establishment and maintenance of African American communities in Oklahoma during the late nineteenth century.

Larry Murphy

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James B. Bennett is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. Previously, he was an assistant professor in the University of Oklahoma Honors College. Jim earned his Ph.D. in American Religious History at Yale University, and also holds degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and UCLA (B.A. English/American Studies). He is the author of Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), which uses New Orleans as a case study to examine the ways that biracial denominations, especially Methodists and Catholics, first resisted but then capitulated to racially segregated churches. A related article, “Catholics, Creoles, and the Redefinition of Race in New Orleans,” appears in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas ed. Henry Goldschmidt and Liza McAlister (Oxford University Press, 2004).

Dr. Cynthia Carsten is a Faculty Associate in the Department of Religious Studies at Arizona State University where she teaches Native American Religious Traditions, Oral Traditions, and Religion and Justice: Religious Freedom in American Culture. Her publications include “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Mystical Tradition, Sewanee Theological Review and “Jackpine Roots: Autobiography, Tradition, and Resistance in the Stories of Three Yukon Elders,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal. She is currently involved in research on the religious histories of Native American families in the Southwestern United States.

Derek Chang is Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies at Cornell University, where he is also a member of the American Studies faculty.  He received his Ph.D. in History from Duke University in 2002.  He has contributed chapters to two recent multi-disciplinary collections on religion: “‘Marked in Body, Mind, and Spirit’: Home Missionaries and the Remaking of Race and Nation,” in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, edited by Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister (Oxford University Press, 2004), and “‘Brought Together Upon Our Own Continent’:  Race, Religion, and Evangelical Nationalism in American Baptist Home Missions, 1865-1900,” in Immigrant Faiths:  Transforming Religious Life in America, edited by Karen I. Leonard, Alex Stepick, Manuel A. Vasquez, and Jennifer Holdaway (AltaMira Press, 2005).  He is currently completing a manuscript on African American and Chinese interactions with the American Baptist Home Mission Society, tentatively entitled, “Converting Race, Transforming the Nation: Evangelical Christianity and the ‘Problem’ of Difference in Late-Nineteenth Century America.”  He lives in Ithaca, NY, with his wife and two children.

Ronald G. Coleman is an Associate Professor of history and ethnic studies, and former coordinator of the Ethnic Studies Programat the University of Utah, a post he held from July 1984 to July 1991. He held the position of Associate Vice President for Diversity and Faculty Development from December 1989 to July 1999. Dr. Coleman’s primary research focus is African American history. He has presented his work at a variety of history and ethnic studies conferences and is frequently invited to lecture on topics varying from African American history to contemporary race relations in the United States. His publications include articles on western black history. “Is There No Blessing for Me? Jane Elizabeth Manning James, A Mormon African American Woman” in African American Women Confront the West; “Blacks in Utah: An Unknown Legacy;” in The Peoples f Utah; “The Buffalo Soldiers: Guardians of the Uintah Frontier;” and “Black Pioneers in Utah, 1847-1869.” He is a member of the Utah State Board of History. He has served as an educational consultant for the University of Vermont, California State University, Hayward; Utah Transit Authority, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Trust for Historic Preservation and several school districts in the state of Utah.

Ellen Eisenberg has taught at Willamette University since 1990, and was appointed to the Dwight and Margaret Lear Professorship in American History in 2003.  She holds a BA from Carleton College and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of Jewish Agricultural Colonies in New Jersey, 1882-1920 (Syracuse, 1995).  Her work on western Jewish communities has appeared in American Jewish History and Journal of American Ethnic History as well as in the anthologies California Jews (Brandeis University Press, 2003) and Jewish Life in the American West  (Autry Museum/Heyday Books, 2002).  Her current projects include a book, co-authored with Ava Kahn and William Toll, on Jews in the Pacific West to be published by the University of Washington Press, and a monograph titled To Be the First to Cry Down Injustice?  Western Jews and the Problem of Japanese Removal, under contract with Lexington Books.

Kathryn Gin is a PhD candidate in the History department at Yale, studying American Religious History.  A California native, she graduated from Stanford in 2004 with a Bachelor of Arts in History.  Her interests include the intersections between ideas about race, culture, and religion, religion and American nationalism, and the ways in which lived experience affected religious beliefs in the 19th century.

Brett Hendrickson is a Ph.D. student in the Religious Studies department at Arizona State University.  His research interests include Mexican and Mexican American popular Catholicism, borderlands religious identity and practice, immigration, and religion and health.  His dissertation will explore the themes of healing, race, border, and exile by drawing on the life of folk saint Teresa Urrea.  Married with two children, Brett is also the pastor of Guadalupe Presbyterian Church.

Kathleen Holscher is a 4th year Ph.D. student in religion at Princeton University.  Her scholarly interests include 20th century American Catholicism, the intersections of religion and constitutional law, the history of the study of religion, and cultural and ethnographic approaches to writing history.  She hopes to have her dissertation, tentatively titled “Habits in the Classroom: A Court Case Regarding Catholic Sisters in New Mexico,” completed in the spring of 2007.  She lives happily in Philadelphia.

Bill Issel is a Professor of History, and former Director of the American Studies Program, at San Francisco State University. He is currently on leave serving as visiting professor at Mills College.  He is the author of Social Change in the United States, 1945-1983 and co-edited the book series “The Contemporary USA” for Palgrave Macmillan. His work concerning religion, ethnicity, and politics in the American West has appeared in Journal of Urban History, U.S. Catholic Historian, Records of the American Catholic Historical Society, and in two anthologies: California Jews and American Labor and the Cold War.  His article on religion and ethnicity as a factor in World War II loyalty investigations in California will appear in May 2006 in Pacific Historical  Review, and he has two book projects underway:  The Deportation of Sylvester Andriano and "For Both Cross and Flag": Catholic Action in Northern California, 1930-1960.

Kristy Nabhan-Warren is Assistant Professor of American Religions at Augustana College, Rock Island, IL. She was recently named a 2005-2006 Young Scholar inAmerican Religion by IUPUI's Center for the Study of Religion and AmericanCulture. Kristy teaches courses on American Christianities, AmericanCatholicism, Women and Religion, and Race, Ethnicity, and Religion.  Her recentpublications include: The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions and MexicanAmerican Catholic Activism (NYU Press, 2005), "Mary in Latino/aCultures" in Latino/a Theologies, (Chalice Press, 2006); and theforthcoming "Teaching Las Casas From a Religious Studies Perspective,"Forthcoming in MLA Book Series, Approaches to Teaching World Literatures, MLA, Winter 2006. Kristy enjoys spending time with her husband, Steve Warren, and their son, Cormac Nabhan-Warren.

Quincy D. Newell is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wyoming. She received her Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she studied American religious history under the direction of Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp. Newell is currently at work on her first monograph, a study of religious interaction between Native Americans and Hispanic colonists in and around Mission San Francisco in Alta California from 1776-1821. Her next project, already underway, will examine marginal figures in early Mormonism.

Duncan Ryuken Williams is currently Associate Professor of East Asian Buddhism at UC-Irvine.  In Fall 2006, he will be Associate Professor of Japanese Buddhism at UC-Berkeley.  He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University.  He is the author of "The Other Side of Zen" (Princeton UP), translator of four Japanese books, and editor of three volumes including "American Buddhism" (Routledge Curzon).  He is currently completing a manuscript entitled "Camp Dharma: Japanese-American Buddhism and the World War Two Incarceration Experience" (forthcoming, UC Press) and an edited volume, "Issei Buddhism in the Americas: The Pioneers of the Japanese-American Buddhist Diaspora."