Samah Choudhury is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at DePaul University where she teaches courses on Islam, race, and gender in the Americas. Samah is at work on her first book, Standup Citizen: American Muslim Humor and the Politics of Secularity, which asks how a sense of humor came to be a prized trait of the modern secular subject and why present-day Muslims are consistently configured as lacking this comportment. Through a study of the American Muslim standup comedians, she contends that Muslim legibility depends on situating Islam within the logics of model secular subjecthood and the register of race. Her work has been supported by the Asian American Religions Research Initiative, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World, the UNC Chapel Hill Asian American Center, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice. She holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from UNC Chapel Hill, and previously taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and Ithaca College.

Dr. Shaunesse’ Jacobs Plaisimond is Assistant Professor of Religion and Health at the University of South Florida. She is also affiliate faculty in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as the College of Public Health’s Community Health Sciences department. Her research centers ways that personhood can inform healthcare decision-making for black birthing people through an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach.  She has held several research fellowships, received numerous grants, and published in several journals. Her first monograph, in progress, assesses the impact on pregnancy care caused by healthcare refusal laws and their implementation in religiously affiliated healthcare organizations.

Kate E. Soules, Ph.D. is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Religion & Education Collaborative and a religious literacy scholar, educator, and consultant. Her research focuses on the assessment of religious literacy, curriculum development, teacher learning, and the impacts of religious literacy education. Soules has consulted as a curriculum specialist and program evaluator with organizations including the the Centre for Civil Religious Literacy, the International Baccalaureate, the Aspen Institute's Religion and Society Program, and the American Academy of Religion. She is the author of several works on religious literacy and co-edited the volume Religious Literacies in Educational Contexts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2025). Soules has developed and taught courses about religious literacy and religious liberty for learners from elementary school through adult professional development. She holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College Lynch School of Education and Human Development. She is looking forward to learning from the many interdisciplinary perspectives in this cohort and thinking about how her work can be applied across different contexts.