Effective August 1, 2022, Dr. Emily D. Crews (PhD 2021) is the Assistant Director of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion. As Assistant Director, she contributes to advancing the research agenda of the Center. Dr. Crews assists faculty and graduate students with translating their work to public audiences, as well as managing the Center’s community and academic partnerships and its engagement with the media.

Dr. Crews’ Dr. Crews brings a wealth of teaching, research, and publishing experience to the position. Her research and teaching investigate the ways that women’s religious lives are bound up with issues of race, gender, and reproduction. Her current research project focuses on the significance of alternative reproductive health practices to the construction of certain forms of white femininity in evangelical Christian communities in the American South. She is currently at work on a digital humanities site, supported by a grant from the Center for Lived Religion in the Digital Age, that explores the landscape of African immigrant religions in Chicago. Dr. Crews is the co-editor of Remembering Jonathan Z. Smith: A Career and Its Consequence (with Russell McCutcheon, 2020) and African Diaspora Religions in 5 Minutes (with Curtis J. Evans, forthcoming 2023).