Şahin Açıkgöz is an Assistant Professor of Islam, Gender, and Sexuality in the Department for the Study of Religion and a member of the executive committee of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program. They were a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Study of Religion at the University of California, Riverside from 2020 to 2022. They received their Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and LGBTQ Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where they cofounded the Transnational Gender and Sexuality Studies Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop and were the Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. They were also the recipient of the 2019 Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship in LGBT Studies at Yale University and the Holstein Dissertation Fellowship in Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion at UC Riverside. Their research areas are Queer and Trans Studies in Islam, Slavery, Gender and Sexuality in Islamicate Societies, Trans of Color Critique, Global South, Transnational Feminisms, and Gender Politics in the Middle East.

Mentee: Ali Yıldırım

Xochitl Alvizo (she/her) is an associate professor of Women and Religion and the Philosophy of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality at California State University, Northridge. She teaches in Religious Studies, her home department, as well as in the Queer Studies and Civic and Community Engagement programs. Her research areas include feminist and queer theories, congregational studies, ecclesiology, and the emerging church. She is co-editor of Women Religion Revolution (FSR Books, 2017) with Gina Messina and co-editor of The Emerging Church, Millennials, and Religion: Volume 2 (Cascade Books, 2022) with Terry Shoemaker and Rachel C. Schneider. She lives in Los Angeles, CA where she was also born and raised.

Mentee: Lake Stein

El/yse Ambrose, Ph.D. is a blackqueer ethicist, artist, and educator. Ambrose’s forthcoming book, A Blackqueer Sexual Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (London: T&T Clark, 2024) examines approaches to sexual ethics through a blackqueer/ing lens toward a construction of a communal-based, transreligious sexual ethics grounded in blackqueer living archive. They are the creator of the Black Trans Ethical World(un)making Lab. Their artistic work-in-progress, stilled waters|“water overflows with memory” (inspired by M. Jacqui Alexander’s words), is a photographic and sound experiment in river water and black geography, Ambrose’s southern roots, and memory.

Ambrose currently serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Study and the Department for the Study of Religion at University of California, Riverside. Their research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and UC Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society, the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion, the Forum for Theological Exploration, Columbia University's Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Yale University LGBT Studies Fellowship, and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. 

El/yse Ambrose resides in Los Angeles. They are a proud partner, plant sibling, and parakeet parent.

Mentee: Michelle Bostic

Rudy Busto is an Associate Professor in Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He approaches religion in North America through forms of alterity to uncover hidden and subjugated histories and actors in American religion. This close attention to forms of non-"normative" subjectivities provokes examination of how the study of religion has itself been structured and shaped by assumptions about race/ethnicity, queerness, class, etc., and helps explain theoretical weaknesses in critical analyses of religion. To study religion in this way acknowledges the necessity of counterdisciplinarity — that is, refusing and working against established disciplinary regimes. Counterdisciplinarity as a mode of reading, research, writing and teaching produces new insight and objects of study hidden when merely borrowing or adapting tools from established disciplines.  More specifically, counterdisciplinarity informs all of his teaching, research and writing: on U.S. Latinx religion; Asian and Pacific American religious traditions; constructions of indigeneity; the transformation of world religious traditions in the United States; religion in the American west and Pacific Rim; evangelical Christianity; science fiction as a genre for “making strange” issues of alterity. The broadest view of “alterity” now compels him into thinking about First Contact and how religious traditions may or may not be relevant to off-world human and post-human futures, as well as related questions of animality, vegetality, and the post-biological.

Mentee: J Selke

Peter Anthony Mena is an Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego. His scholarly work focuses on the histories of Christianity. Mena utilizes critical theories (postcolonial, gender and queer theories, and cultural studies) as approaches to study the past with the goals of considering current political, social, and cultural moments. Mena’s first monograph, Place and Identity in the Lives of Antony, Paul, and Mary of Egypt: Desert as Borderland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), uses the work of Chicana writer, Gloria Anzaldúa, to consider the descriptions of space and identity in Christian hagiographies from Late Antiquity and is the winner of the Hispanic Theological Initiative's Annual Book Prize (2020). At the University of San Diego, Professor Mena teaches courses in Catholic Theology, Early Christianities, as well as Latine Theologies and Chicane Religious Identities. His current research is focused on gender, performance, and the theater in ancient Christian literature.

Mentee: Megan Wines