About the Contributors

Ann Burlein teaches religious studies at Hofstra University, where she offers courses in Religion, Medicine and Science; Religion and Theory; as well as Religion, Sexuality, and the Body. Her first book, Lift High the Cross: Where Supremacy and the Religious Right Converge (Duke University Press, 2002) explored the intersection between contemporary conservativism, religion as cultural memory, and media technology via the image of "the family Bible." She is currently at work on a book reading Foucault as a theorist of religion, as well as a series of articles about the pedagogy of teaching religion at this particular political conjuncture (Cf. "Learning to Drink Deeply from Books: Using Experiential Assignments to Teach Concepts." Teaching Theology and Religion 14/2 (2011): 137-155.)

Janet R. Jakobsen is Director of the Center for Research on Women and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, where she has also served as Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics. With Ann Pellegrini she is the author of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance and editor of Secularisms, and with Elizabeth Castelli she is editor of Interventions: Academics and Activists Respond to Violence. Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst and organizer in Washington, D.C.

Laura Levitt is a Professor of Religion, Jewish studies and Gender at Temple University where she directed the Women's Studies Program (2009-2011). She is the author of American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust (2007) and Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home (1997) and an editor of Judaism since Gender (1997) and Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (2003). Her current project, "Evidence as Archive" builds on her prior work in feminist theory and Holocaust studies in order to take more seriously criminal evidence held in police storage as a repository of memory. Her abiding interest in photography and film is reflected in much of her writing. Laura was for many years, the director of Jewish studies at Temple and one of its founders.

Minoo Moallem is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies Department at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Cultural Politics of Patriarchy in Iran, University of California Press, 2005, the co-editor (with Caren Kaplan and Norma Alarcon) of Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and The State, Duke University Press, 1999, and the guest editor of a special issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East on Iranian Immigrants, Exiles and Refugees. Trained as a sociologist, she writes on transnational and postcolonial feminist studies, religious nationalism and transnationalism, consumer culture, immigration and diaspora studies, Middle Eastern studies and Iranian cultural politics and diasporas. Professor Moallem has recently ventured in digital media. Her digital project "Nation-on-the Move" (design by Eric Loyer) was published in Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular (Special issue on Difference, Fall 2007). She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled, "Nation as Transnational Commodity: The Mobile World of the Persian Carpet." She is also working on a research project on material and visual cultures of religion, and a project on Iran-Iraq war movies and masculinity.

Catherine Sameh is Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and managing editor of The Scholar & Feminist Online. She is also in charge of transnational collaborations with peer centers globally. Catherine's work at BCRW draws on her expertise on transnational feminism developed in her dissertation, "Signatures, Networks, Rights: Iranian Feminism in the Transnational Sphere." Before entering academia, Catherine co-founded In Other Words Women's Books and Resources and was active in the reproductive justice movement in Portland, Oregon.

Saadia Toor is Associate Professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. She is originally from Pakistan and has been active in the women's movement there for the past twenty years. She has written extensively on issues of gender and sexuality in South Asia and Pakistan. Her book on Pakistan, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan, has just been released by Pluto Press.

Dominic Wetzel is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at St. Cloud State University and member of the editorial collective of Situations: Project for the Radical Imagination. Long involved in queer and global justice organizing, his work looks at the intersections of religion, politics, and sexuality. His dissertation "Re-enchanting the World: Religion, Desire and the Crisis of Modernity" analyzes the negative utopian desire of the Catholic charismatic movement. He received his PhD in Sociology from the Graduate Center at CUNY in 2010. He is currently working on a project that examines the "hidden religious and class histories" of younger generations of queer people who grew up within post-1980s conservative, politicized religious movements.

Melissa Wilcox is Associate Professor and Chair of Religion and Director of Gender Studies at Whitman College. She is author or co-editor of several books and numerous articles on gender, sexuality, and religion, including Coming Out in Christianity: Religion, Identity, and Community; Queer Women and Religious Individualism; and (with David W. Machacek) Sexuality and the World's Religions.