WASHINGTON (August 28, 2025) — Today, Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, announced the selection of 12 interdisciplinary scholars as PRRI Public Fellows, the organization’s eighth cohort of fellows and the first cohort under its Religion and Protecting Democracy Initiative. Selected via a nationwide open call for mid-career scholars, the diverse cohort will work alongside PRRI researchers and staff to generate impactful commentary and analysis at the intersection of religion, culture, and politics.

“At a time when both rapid change and deep tensions mark America’s racial and religious landscape, PRRI is committed to supporting public scholars who help us make sense of these challenges,” said Melissa Deckman, Ph.D., chief executive officer of PRRI. “I’m confident this year’s cohort of PRRI Public Fellows will advance innovative research and produce public scholarship that helps us understand and respond to the current moment.”

Through the Religion and Protecting Democracy Initiative, the Public Fellows program encourages collaboration and professional growth. During their time in the program, Public Fellows will be organized into four groups, based on their work in PRRI’s major research areas: racial justice and white supremacy; immigration and migration studies; LGBTQ rights and gender; and reproductive health and rights. All Public Fellows also benefit from PRRI’s ongoing public opinion research and media contacts.

The PRRI Public Fellows program is made possible through generous grants from the Mellon Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation. The 2025-2026 cohort is comprised of scholars with expertise across the humanities, humanistic social sciences, and empirical social sciences, including history, sociology, political science, anthropology, and religious studies.

PRRI welcomes 2025-2026 Public Fellows: Dr. Risa Cromer, Dr. Ahmad Green-Hayes, Dr. Lauren Griffin, Dr. Darrius Hills, Dr. Jelani Ince, Dr. Will McCorkle, Dr. Charles McCrary, Dr. Lina Murillo, Dr. Michal Raucher, Dr. E. Kyle Romero, Dr. Anne Whitesell, and Dr. Shatavia Wynn.

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About PRRI

PRRI is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to conducting independent research at the intersection of religion, culture, and public policy.

2025-2026 PRRI Public Fellows

Racial Justice and White Supremacy

Lauren Horn Griffin, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and History at Louisiana State University

Lauren Horn Griffin (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies and the Department of History at Louisiana State University. Her current book project, #Trad: Manufacturing Tradition in an Age of Hyperconnectivity, uses a variety of traditionalist Catholic aesthetics online as examples of how algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok increasingly shape discourses around “white Western civilization” and “traditional” gender norms. Her article in Journal of Media and Religion (September 2024), “How #Trad Catholics Challenge Current Constructions of Christian Nationalism,” was named one of the Top Ten Articles in Digital Religion Research in 2024 by the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Cultural Studies. She is the author of Fabricating Founders (Brill, 2023) and the editor of Discourses of Crisis and the Study of Religion (Equinox, 2025). Her public-facing work has appeared in The Revealer, Religion Dispatches, Religion News Service, and The Conversation. She contributed a piece on Catholic participation in the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack for the Smithsonian Museum’s digital archive of January 6, Uncivil Religion. She also produced a podcast episode, “Trads: Manufacturing Tradition in Catholic Churches in New Orleans,” through the University of Virginia’s Race, Religion, and Democracy Lab.

Jelani Ince, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington

 Jelani Ince (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. He is a mixed-methods researcher who examines how resource dependencies in churches impact their ability to accomplish their diversity missions, and how social movements shape the political process in response to racial injustice. He is the author of Shepherds and Kings: How Philanthropy Stymies Diversity’s Potential (under advance contract with Princeton University Press).

Charles McCrary, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Humanities at Eckerd College

Charles McCrary (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Humanities at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. He is the author of Sincerely Held: American Secularism and Its Believers (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which won the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (Analytical-Descriptive category). His work has been published in academic journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and Religion & American Culture, as well as in popular outlets such as The Revealer, Slate, and The New Republic. He is currently working on two book projects related to religion, secularism, and eugenics in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States.

LGBTQ Rights and Gender

Ahmad Greene-Hayes, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard University 

Ahmad Greene-Hayes (he/him) is an Associate Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School. His research and teaching interests include 19th and 20th-century African American religious history; race, sexuality, and religion in the Americas; interdisciplinary archive studies; and theories and methods in the study of religion and Black Studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Religion with certificates in African American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies from Princeton University, and his B.A. in History and Africana Studies, with highest honors, from Williams College. He is the author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans (University of Chicago Press, 2025) and Little Richard’s Witness: Liner Notes on Black Religion and Sexuality, forthcoming with Penguin Random House.

Darrius Hills, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Grinnell College

 Darrius Hills (he/him) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Grinnell College. His scholarship addresses African American Religious Thought, American Christianities, masculinity studies, and Religion and Culture in America. Hills’ research has been supported by many organizations, including the United Methodist Church, the Forum for Theological Exploration, the Wabash Center, the Louisville Institute, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His first book, A Misrepresented People: Manhood in Black Religious Thought, was released from NYU Press in January 2025.

Shatavia L. Wynn, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Africana and Religious Studies at Rhodes College

Shatavia L. Wynn (she/her/they/them) serves as Assistant Professor of Africana and Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn. Wynn received a Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics, and Society from Vanderbilt University. Their research examines the morals and values of Black women in the American South, with broader interests spanning popular culture, Black church studies, phenomenology, aesthetics, and Black feminist and womanist studies.

Immigration and Migration

Will McCorkle, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Teacher Education at College of Charleston

Will McCorkle (he/him) is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education at College of Charleston. He is a former secondary social studies teacher in Latin America and South Carolina. His research focuses on the experiences and educational rights of marginalized immigrant communities, public beliefs and attitudes towards immigration, and teaching about immigration in the social studies classroom. He has worked extensively with immigration advocacy in South Carolina and with asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico Border. His public scholarship includes publications in The Conversation, Washington Post, San Diego Union-Tribune, Houston Chronicle, and Dallas Morning News.

Lina-Maria Murillo, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin

Lina-Maria Murillo (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include the borderlands, women’s health and reproductive justice, Latina/o/x studies, and social justice movements. She is the author of Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Her other projects include a study of how “fears of white demographic decline” have translated into a hostile legal and social environment for pregnant women and people in the last two centuries, and a biography of the little-known abortion rights activist Patricia Maginnis, who in the years before Roe v. Wade established an organized abortion network across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Kyle Romero, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida

Kyle Romero (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida, where he writes and teaches on the history of U.S. foreign policy, migration, and humanitarianism and human rights, emphasizing how political, religious, and cultural dynamics shape responses to migration crises. He received his Ph.D. in 2020 from Vanderbilt University and has previously served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. His work has appeared in academic journals including Diplomatic History and Migration Letters, as well as in popular outlets like TIME and The Washington Post. He is currently working on his first book, under contract with Columbia University Press, titled Moving People: Refugee Politics and the Emergence of American Humanitarianism, which traces the role of American institutions, including missionary groups, in shaping U.S. refugee politics over the course of the twentieth century.

Reproductive Health and Rights

Risa Cromer, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University

 Risa Cromer (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University where she teaches on gender studies, health politics, and science and technology studies. Cromer is a feminist cultural anthropologist specializing in the intersections of reproductive politics, religion, and race/racism in the United States, whose research has been supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, Luce Foundation, American Academy of Religion, and American Association of University Women. She is the author of Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics (NYU Press 2023), which provides a timely look at the contemporary stakes of post-Roe America by examining the strategic inroads made by the U.S. Christian Right in the realm of assisted reproduction over the past quarter century. She co-leads the Reproductive Righteousness Project and is working on her next book about post-Roe reproduction in red states. Cromer’s work has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and popular outlets, ranging from Medical Anthropology to Rewire News.

Michal Raucher, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University

 Michal Raucher (she/her) is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her research focuses on reproduction, religious authority, and gender among Jews in America and Israel/Palestine. She is the author of Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women (Indiana University Press, 2020). She recently completed her second book, The New Rabbis, an ethnography of women rabbis in American Orthodoxy. Raucher is a principal investigator on two studies exploring the intersection of religious identity and abortion in America.

Anne Whitesell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in Political Science at Miami University

 Anne M. Whitesell (she/her) is an Associate Professor in Political Science at Miami University. She is the author of Living off the Government? Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare (NYU Press, 2024), which examines how stereotypes of welfare recipients are used by interest groups to create state welfare policy. Whitesell’s research has been published in Political Research Quarterly, Party Politics, Politics & Gender, State Politics & Policy Quarterly, and Policy Studies Journal. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Pennsylvania State University in 2017.