Elayne Oliphant is an associate professor of Religious Studies and Anthropology and, as of fall 2024, the new co-director of the Center for Religion and Media at New York University. She has spent more than fifteen years studying the monumental space occupied by Roman Catholicism in the French landscape and imaginary. Her first book on this subject, The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in France, won the Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in 2022. She is broadly interested in how religious theology, practice, and media are embedded in systems of power, often serving both as tools of domination and resistance. In current research that moves across Paris, Ardèche, and Martinique, she explores the significance of Roman Catholic actors and theologies in processes of racialization, monoculture, and enslavement in the French Atlantic World, and how various groups have work to expand the possibilities of land, freedom, and salvation beyond those held fast by particular visions of Catholicism. She is excited and honored to take on this new role directing the Center for Religion & Media where so much important thinking about and conversing on the mediated processes through which humans, gods, and spirits interact has occurred.
In addition to her role as co-director of the Center for Religion and Media, Faye Ginsburg is David Kriser Professor of Anthropology, founding and ongoing Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History, founder of the interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Culture and Media, and founding co-Director of the NYU Council for the Study of Disabilities. Her work over the years as a filmmaker, writer and curator has focused on movements for social transformation, and the key role played by cultural activists in these processes, from her multiple award winning book, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community, to her several edited collections on reproduction and gender, to her groundbreaking collection, Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, to her forthcoming book, Mediating Culture: Indigenous Media in a Digital Age. She is recipient of numerous awards for her work including research support and Fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Spencer, Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, as well as support from the Pew Charitable Trusts for the inauguration of the Center for Religion and Media. She is currently working on research on Cultural Innovation and Learning Disabilities. Dr. Ginsburg is also a Vice-President of the Dysautonomia Foundation.
Brett Krutzsch holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies and came to NYU’s Center for Religion and Media as the Editor of The Revealer after two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Haverford College. He is a scholar of religion, sexuality, and LGBTQ history in the United States. Krutzsch is the author of the book Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019), a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for best LGBTQ nonfiction book of the year. His co-edited volume (with Nora Rubel), Blessings Beyond the Binary: Transparent and the Queer Jewish Family, comes out from Rutgers University Press in September 2024. A recipient of the Virginia Ramey Mollenkott LGBTQ Religious History Award, his writing has appeared in several scholarly journals as well as the Washington Post, Newsday, the Advocate, the New York Times, and he has been featured on NPR.
Dr. Krutzsch also teaches in NYU’s Department of Religious Studies. He can be reached at brett.krutzsch@nyu.edu. To pitch a story idea for The Revealer, please email editor@therevealer.org.
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CO-FOUNDER, CENTER FOR RELIGION AND MEDIA
Angela Zito co-founded the Center for Religion and Media with Faye Ginsburg in 2003 and served as its co-director for 21 years. Zito received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and teaches anthropology and history of Chinese religions at NYU. She is the author of Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in 18th Century China. Since founding the Center for Religion and Media, she has curated independent Chinese documentary screenings in New York through the ReelChina film series. She has also worked on her own documentary film and currently has a new book under contract. Her website is www.angelazito.com