the bardo team
-
Founder and Co-Director
Megan Goodwin is a scholar of religion, race, gender/sexuality, and American politics. She is the author of Abusing Religion: Religious Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions (Rutgers 2020). She is currently writing Cults Inc: The Business of Bad Religion.
With Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, she cohosts the Wilbur Award-winning podcast Keeping It 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion. Goodwin and Morgenstein Fuerst’s first coauthored book, Religion Is Not Done With You, is forthcoming (Beacon 2024).
Goodwin also offers creative and pedagogical design services through Feral Nerd Consulting. Clients include The Crossroads Project (Princeton), The Grounded Knowledge Project (ACLS/IDCL), Shared Sacred Sites (Stanford), Bad Catholics, Good Trouble Webcomics (Luce), Queer Trans Religion (UC Riverside), Women Engaging the Catholic Social Tradition (USF), and American Religion (IU Bloomington).
-
Co-Director
Award-winning and Amazon bestselling author Kelly J. Baker is a freelance writer with a religious studies PhD who covers religion, racism, higher education, gender, labor, motherhood, and popular culture. She’s written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Rumpus, Chronicle Vitae, Religion & Politics, Killing the Buddha, and The Washington Post among others.
Her first book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 (University Press of Kansas, 2011), won the American Library Association Choice Award in 2012. Her second book, Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces (Blue Crow Books, 2017), details her life as a mother on the fringes of academia and was named one of the Best Books in New Religion Journalism of the Decade by Religion Dispatches. Her third book, Sexism Ed: Essays on Gender and Labor in Academia (2017), won the Foreword INDIES Gold award for Women’s Studies. Her fourth book, The Zombies Are Coming: The Realities of the Zombie Apocalypse in American Culture (Revised and Expanded Edition, Blue Crow Books, 2020), is the culmination of many years’ research on apocalypses and zombies and was the 2021 Gold Medal Winner from the Florida Authors and Publishers Association (FAPA) President’s Book Awards. And her fifth book, Final Girl: And Other Essays on Grief, Trauma, and Mental Illness (Blue Crow Books, 2020) is another memoir in essays about surviving trauma, learning to live with mental illness, and managing the ongoing nature of grief. With Joseph Fruscione, she co-edited Succeeding Outside of the Academy: Career Paths beyond the Humanities, Social Sciences, and STEM (University Press of Kansas, 2018).
-
Board Member
Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University, Associated Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Effron Center for the Study of America.
Her research focuses on early twentieth-century African American religious history, and she has explored a range of topics, including in the relation of religion to constructions of race, the impact on black religious life of migration, immigration, and urbanization in African American women’s religious history, and religion in film and popular culture.
She is currently Director of The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities and Cultures, a four-year project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation aimed at producing deeper understandings of the history and diversity of Black religious life in the U.S.
Professor Weisenfeld’s research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her contributions to the field have been recognized with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Meadville Lombard Theological School. She received the 2020 Graduate Mentoring Award for the Humanities from Princeton’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and a 2023 Faculty Champion Award for the Best of Access, Diversity, and Inclusion from Princeton’s Graduate School.
-
Board Member
Lynne Gerber is a writer, independent scholar, and (occasional) producer. Her work circles around religion, the body, and morality.
She loves helping get papers into archives.