People

Bryan Garsten writes about the history of political thought and contemporary political theory, with a special interest in the themes of persuasion and rhetoric, political representation and judgment, and religion. His first book, Saving Persuasion: a defense of rhetoric and judgment (Harvard 2006), earned the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press for the best manuscript in any field submitted by a first-time author. During the current academic year Garsten will teach courses on democratic rhetoric, representation, and the history of modern political thought.

Phillip Gorski is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. Other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life.

Steven Pincus is the author of Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650-1668 and England’s Glorious Revolution 1688-89 and most recently 1688:The First Modern Revolution.  He has also edited two collections of essays.   He has published numerous essays on the economic, cultural, political and intellectual history of early modern Britain, early modern Empires, and the early modern Atlantic. He has also published work on comparative revolutions and state formation.

Professor Wenger’s research and teaching interests include the history of Christianity in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States (especially the American West), the cultural history of the categories of religion and secularism, the politics of religious freedom, and the intersections of race and religion in American history.

Roger Baumann is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University. He is originally from Ontario, Canada and has a background in Religious Studies. He earned his BA in religion from the University of Waterloo and a Masters in religion from Harvard University. Roger studies intersections of race, religion, and politics and is working on the topic of African American Christian engagement with the issue of Israel and Palestine. His dissertation project is a comparative study combining ethnographic fieldwork, formal interviewing, and comparative historical methods.

Kelsey Champagne is a second year in the History and Renaissance Studies departments. As an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, she studied English and French literature, so her introduction into History was first based in literary and book history. However, she now focuses on Catholics in the British Empire in the 17th century. She is interested in how Catholics were communicating and circulating ideas, texts and people throughout not only the British Isles, but also the Continent and the North American and West Indian colonies. Currently she is studying how Catholics balanced their religious

Margot is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fox Fellow at Yale University. Her research deals with minority group politics and explores the delicate combination of political recognition and religious community building within Islamic movements in France.

Justin Hawkins is pursuing a combined PhD in Political Science and Religious Studies at Yale University. His research interests focus on theological interpretations of political theory texts, as well as right-wing re-enchantment movements, Christian theology, philosophy, and ethical theory. He has a BA in Government from Georgetown University (‘11) and an MAR in Philosophical Theology from Yale Divinity School (‘15).

Mie Inouye is a political theorist whose research interests include democratic theory, critical theory, qualitative research methods, inductive political theory, social movements, religion and politics and the organizing tradition in 20th- and 21st-century American politics. Her dissertation theorizes movement politics as a distinctive democratic tradition whose theory of democratic participation diverges from aggregative, deliberative and participatory democratic theories.

William McMillan is a PhD candidate in Sociology. Broadly interested in the philosophy of social science and social theory, his research focuses on secularization and issues at the intersection of religion, culture, and politics. His dissertation is an extended case study of a conservative Protestant church in Manhattan that is recognized within evangelicalism as specialists in regards to starting churches in global cities around the world.

Cody Musselman is a second-year PhD candidate in Religious Studies, focusing on American Religious History. Before coming to Yale she received a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and a Bachelor of Arts from Kalamazoo College. Her research focuses on the relationship between contemporary modalities of spirituality and neoliberal capitalism. Other research interests include questions about secularism, American religious material culture, and the intersection of religion and marketing. When time permits, she enjoys hiking, camping and rock climbing.

Hannah Peckham is pursuing an MA in Religion at Yale Divinity School, with a concentration in the history of Christianity. She earned an AB from Duke University, where she was a double major in History and Religion and received departmental honors in History for her thesis on the Jesus People movement. Her academic interests include postwar American evangelical culture, 1970s Christian hippies, and charter school educational policy.

Sam Stabler is a recent Yale Sociology PhD and adjunct-lecturer at Hunter College. He studies social conflict in morally diverse societies. His dissertation focused on understanding how such conflicts were shaped by the United State’s expansive colonial frontier. Empirically this means his work explores the religious and political uses of territory in the Puritan New England missionary context from colony founding (1630) through to the early national period (the early 19th century).

Anne Taylor is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at Yale University. She is a Junior Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, and a Junior Fellow of the Initiative on Religion, Politics and Society at the MacMillan Center. Her research blends cultural sociology and comparative-historical methods to study charisma, religion, and power, specifically interactions between charismatic Christian communities and political structures in society. Currently, is researching early modern Britain and the Puritan project in Massachusetts Bay colony in the 17th century.

Mustafa Yavas is interested in political sociology, particularly in the areas of class, religion, social movements, and social networks. His previous research has revolved around various forms and manifestations of social closures and cleavages, including income-based residential segregation, homophily in social networks, and collective identity formation processes.