Harold D. Morales
Executive Director & Director of Curriculum Lab
Harold Morales (he/they) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University (MSU). His work is largely inspired by his family's spiritual roots in Central America and diaspora experience in Los Angeles. His research and teaching focuses on the intersections between race and religion and between lived and mediated experience. He uses these critical lenses to engage Latine religions in general and Latino Muslim groups in particular. Dr. Morales is now focusing on public scholarship initiatives through his research on mural art and community empowerment in the city of Baltimore and through the Center’s collaborative work.
Amrita Bhandari
Budget Officer
Amrita Bhandari (she/her) is the Budger Officer for the Center for Religion and Cities (CRC) at Morgan State University. She is pursuing an MBA from Morgan State University. She has earned bachelor’s degree in Economics and English. Previously she worked at Amazon (one of the five big companies), and United National Population Fund. Her interests include technology applications, data analysis, business administration, and grant reporting.
Lucia Lee
Educational Resource Consultant
Lucia Lee (she/her) is an educator, writer, and co-host of What’s Wrong, Baltimore?, a podcast that explores the issues that affect Baltimoreans and the implications they carry to all American cities. Her experience teaching for Baltimore City Public Schools informs her desire to incorporate global religion, music, film, and history into accessible educational experiences. She earned her M.S. in Secondary Education in English and Special Education at Johns Hopkins University and graduated from Vanderbilt University with her B.A. in English literature and a minor in philosophy.
Amy Landau
Director of Museum Experience Lab
Amy Landau (she/her) is Director of Education and Interpretation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, where she oversees public programs, educational initiatives, and gallery interpretation. She co-leads the Fowler initiative “Engaging Lived Religion in the 21st Century Museum,” with Patrick A. Polk. Landau previously served as Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Islamic and South & Southeast Asian Art at the Walters Art Museum (2009-2018). Landau established “Art, Religion and Cities,” with Dr. Harold Morales and Dr. Homayra Ziad in 2018. She was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in 2017. She lectures and publishes on the arts of early modern Iran, as well as representations of religion and activating anti-colonizing practices in museums. Landau is also a co-PI for the CRC’s Lifeways of Hope initiative.
Santana Alvarado
Senior Project Manager
Santana Alvarado (they/them) graduated from CUNY Hunter with a B.A. in Sociology and a minor in Music. Santana is passionate about reindigenizing the arts, education, youth programs, and queer spaces. Santana proudly sits on the board of Cristosal, the leading human rights organization in the northern triangle of Central America. They’ve dedicated themselves to Black and brown community work. Like their namesake, Santana enjoys playing guitar and writing songs that center justice, liberation, and intimacy with the Divine.
Marquisha Scott
Congregational Data Associate
Marquisha Lawrence Scott (she/her) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work. Her research centers on religious congregations and their impact on community-based and social outcomes. With a MSW, MDiv, and PhD in Social Welfare, Scott has uniquely prepared her for contextual community engagement, facilitation, and research with religious congregations and wider communities.
Isaiah Ellis
research associate
Isaiah Ellis (he/him) Isaiah Ellis is an historian of American religion with expansive interests in how religious concepts are made material in unexpected places, particularly in social forms, built environments, economic landscapes, and the production of state space. His book manuscript in-progress, titled Apostles of Asphalt: Race, Empire, and the Moral Politics of Infrastructure in the American South, examines competing narrations of infrastructural and economic modernity in the U.S. South during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and asks how contemporary debates about American religious, racial, and moral life are articulated through the prism of infrastructure.
He is also working on new projects examining religion in industrial landscapes; tourism and religious corporate forms in the U.S. South; the American citrus industry; and the formative relationships between religious eclecticism, architecture, and urban planning in nineteenth-century American cities.
Former Affiliates
Rupa Pillai
Director of Listening Lab
Rupa Pillai (she/her) is a senior lecturer in the Asian American Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. A cultural anthropologist, she investigates the intersections of religion, race, and migration in the Indo-Caribbean American community in New York City. She is also a co-PI for the CRC’s Good Life Project and Lifeways of Hope initiative. The Good Life Project, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, examines and documents how marginalized communities in American cities navigate the pandemic to negotiate structural barriers and to imagine better futures.
Dr. Rupa Pillai joined the CRC as a board member in 2020, connected us with several community partners during our Relief & Restoration Work of 2020, served as Co-PI for our Good Life Project and Lifeways of Hope Initiative, and as Director of our Listening Lab. We are indebted to Dr. Pillai’s invaluable contributions to the CRC & our communities. We are grateful to Dr. Pillai for their work with the CRC team, their care for our communities, and their collegial friendship and we hope all the best in their future endeavors!
Katie Day
Co-Founder of the Religion & Cities unit of the american academy of religion, crc advisory board
Charles A. Schieren Professor Emerita of Church in Society at United Lutheran Seminary, Philadelphia. I have been honored to serve on the faculty of L.T.S.P. (and now U.L.S.) since 1985, teaching in the area of Church and Society. With an academic background in social ethics (at Union) and urban sociology (at Temple University), my focus in teaching, research (and life) has been at the intersection of faith and societal dynamics. Over the years I have prepared students to look critically at how the community of faith is shaped by, and shapes its social context. Only then, can we have ministries that make sense and are both faithful and effective. More specifically, my attention has been drawn to the interaction of race, religion and violence. I have conducted research and published on: the diversity and construction of urban religion; African American churches and community organizing; Black church arsons and the volunteer rebuilding effort in the U.S.; church responses to HIV/AIDS in South Africa; and how faith communities make sense of gun violence. Theologically, I have been rooted in Public Theology and have published, spoken and been part of organizational building in this area. My major theological mentor is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and I continue to dive deeply into his works in teaching and writing. Along the way I have been honored to be a visiting professor in a number of other schools including Princeton Seminary, Chester University (U.K.), Stellenbosch University (South Africa), Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, and the Urban Ecologies program, at New York Theological Seminary. Because public theology is both a matter of reflection and action, I have a long resume as an activist for social transformation. Prayer, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr advocated, is that which we do on our knees and on our feet. I believe the Church and interfaith community is continually called into difficult conversations and sustained work for justice and peace despite formidable challenges.
Teresa Leslie
Public Health Associate
Dr. Teresa E. Leslie (she/her) is a scientist, community engagement specialist and educator. In addition to her published research investigating the interaction and delicate balance between people, the environment, animals, and pathogens, Dr. Leslie has authored books and articles that examine the inter-relationships between racism and classism, public/global health inequity and sustainable community development in national and international contexts.
Advisory Council
The CRC Advisory Council is composed of leading scholars of religion and cities, public scholars whose work engages the city of Baltimore, and community partner leaders. The Council’s various committees help to shape and evaluate the CRC’s vision and activities as well as to foster collaborative work between Morgan and community partners. Council members help to develop our vision statements, the guidelines for awarding grants and fellowships, and evaluate and select grant recipients. They consult, work on, and evaluate CRC projects. Council members also help to organize the annual CRC conference theme, keynote speakers, panelists, community participants, and other logistical tasks. The CRC holds quarterly council meetings each year by virtual communication.
Abel R. Gómez is Assistant Professor of Indigenous spiritual traditions in the Religion Department at Texas Christian University. His research and teaching examine the relationships between sacred sites, ceremony, gender and sexuality, Indigenous cosmologies, and (de)colonization. In particular, Abel conducts ethnographic research among Ohlone tribal communities in the San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay regions to theorize Indigenous resurgence and movements to protect sacred sites. He is a steering committee member for the Native Traditions in the Americas Unit of the American Academy of Religion and a member of the Theories of Land working group through the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. In addition to work in the academy, Abel is committed to public facing scholarship to amplify voices and movements of Indigenous sovereignty and decolonial futurity. He is a first generation queer Latinx scholar descending from Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, and Mexican lineages that migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area, the homeland of the Ohlone peoples.
Abel also serves as and educational resource consultant and 2024 Good Life Project PI for the CRC.
Dr. Alisa Perkins is an anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University and an affiliate scholar with the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding who is engaged in ongoing ethnographic study of Muslim American civic engagement in the metro Detroit area. In collaboration with the non-profit organization Dream of Detroit, Perkins is Project Manager for “The Detroit Muslim Storytelling Project,” a public humanities and documentary film initiative to build knowledge about the city’s Black Muslim leadership supported by grants from the Pillars Fund, the Whiting Foundation, and the Henry Luce Foundation. Perkins’ first book, Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit (NYU Press, 2020), based on a multi-year study of Hamtramck, Michigan, was supported by by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Philanthropic Educational Organization.
Christopher D. Cantwell is an assistant professor of digital public history at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches classes on American religious and digital humanities. His work has appeared in Religions, The Public Historian, and the Atlantic, and he has helped edit The Pew and the Picket Line: Christianity and the American Working Class (Illinois, 2015), and Digital Humanities and Research Methods in the Study of Religion: An Introduction (DeGruyter, 2020). He is also the founding curator of Gathering Places: Religion and Community in the Modern City, which is a digital project that seeks to develop a living archive of today’s religious diversity.
Baylor University and co-chair of the Religion and Cities program unit of the American Academy of Religion. Elise Edwards is a native of Maryland, but she moved to Waco to begin her teaching career at Baylor in fall 2013. Dr. Edwards teaches courses in Christian ethics and theology in Baylor’s Department of Religion. She earned her Ph.D. in Religion at Claremont Graduate University in California, where she studied Theology, Ethics, and Culture. Prior to pursuing a Ph.D. in theology, Dr. Edwards worked as an architect in Washington D.C. and she still maintains her license to practice architecture. She earned her Bachelor of Science and Master of Architecture degrees at Florida A&M University, and a Master of Theological Studies at the John Leland Center for Theological Studies, a Baptist seminary. In her architectural career, Dr. Edwards focused on college and university buildings, which is now where she spends most of her days teaching and doing research. Her research is interdisciplinary, moving between fields of theology, ethics, architectural theory, and aesthetics to examine issues of civic engagement and to question how Christian beliefs and commitments are expressed publicly. As a black feminist, Dr. Edwards focuses her research on cultural expressions by, for, and about women and marginalized communities. She is working on her first book, Building Justice: Theological Commitments in Architectural Design, which is about Christian values in architecture. In the classroom, Dr. Edwards strives to help her students realize the diversity of perspectives within Christian thought and to improve their critical thinking and writing skills. She serves the local community and broader academic community through numerous leadership roles in Creative Waco, the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Christian Ethics, and her local Baptist church.
Is the son of two Puerto Rican migrants who came to the united states a year before he was born. Though his mother was raised in the tall, curvy mountains of Barranquitas, and his father in the humid, bustling streets of Rio Piedras, Jorge grew up with his parents, grandmother, and uncle in a small affordable housing community in urban Manchester, Connecticut.
His story of diaspora, language, gender, race, and disability has propelled his academic journey, leading him to degrees in biblical studies, social theory, and liberation theologies. Dr. Rodríguez completed his Ph.D. in History at Union Theological Seminary.
After six years with the Hispanic Summer Program—starting as a Social Media Intern in 2014 and swiftly moving into grant writing and implementation—Dr. Rodríguez serves the HSP as the Associate Director for Strategic Programming overseeing new initiatives and grants. Dr. Rodríguez lives in New York City with his partner, Ashley, and BerneDoodle, Alfabeto.
Past Members of the Council
Benjamin Sax, Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies
Kayla Renée Wheeler, Assistant professor at Xavier University
Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada, Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College
Ann Duncan, American Studies and Religion and the Center for Geographies of Justice at Goucher College
Felicia Y. Thomas, Assistant Professor of History at Morgan State University
Marcos Bisticas-Cocoves, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan
R. Drew Smith, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
Dayvon Love, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle
Fatimah Fanusie, director of the Civic Leaders Fellowship program at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies
Joe Pettit, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan
Phong Le, Associate Professor in the Center for Data, Mathematical and Computational Sciences at Goucher College
Samia Kirchner, School of Architecture and Planning at Morgan
Heber Brown, III, Pleasant Hope Baptist Church
Kimberly Lagree, Baltimore City Health Department Trauma Coordinator
Paola Pascual-Ferra, Department of Communication at Loyola University Maryland
Teresa L. Smallwood, Associate Professor of Public Theology, United Lutheran Seminary
Tiara Matthews, Director of Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm
Support
Shemiah Morris - 2019 Research Assistant
Mofiyinfoluwa Shotayo - 2020 Research Assistant
Semora Council - 2020 Research Assistant
Stanley Jenkins - 2021-2022 Community Engagement Research Fellow