Profiles of Current President, Secretary, & Council Members

President (2024-2025)

Tricia C. Bruce (PhD, University of California Santa Barbara, 2006) is a sociologist of religion and Director of the Springtide Research Institute. She is a long-time ASR member, having received the 2004 Robert J. McNamara Student Paper Award. Upon election to ASR’s Executive Council in 2020, she assumed collaborative leadership roles to deliver a fully online ASR conference (2021) and reorganize ASR’s investments into a socially responsible endowment. She brings experience as Chair of ASA’s Religion Section (2022-2023), Steering Committee Member for AAR’s Sociology of Religion Unit (2018-2021), and treasurer for the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (2017-2021). Her research and consulting expertise centers religion/Catholicism and the dynamics of political, social, and organizational change. Her award-winning books and reports include Parish and Place, Faithful Revolution, American Parishes, Polarization in the US Catholic Church, and How Americans Understand Abortion (cited in the Washington Post, Atlantic, The Hill, Commonweal, and more). Her writing appears in The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, LA Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others. Prior appointments include Associate Professor at Maryville College and Research Assistant Professor at Georgetown University (CARA); funders include the National Science Foundation, US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Louisville Institute, and more.

Tricia Bruce’s Vision Statement

Since 1938, the Association for the Sociology of Religion (once the American Catholic Sociological Society) has welcomed scholars of religion from all continents of the world. Its journal Sociology of Religion and book series Religion and the Social Order advance leading-edge theory and research; its grants and awards uplift vital scholarship; its conference brings together people and ideas in a welcoming, professional, international, and network-building setting each year. As ASR President, I vow to lead the Association with respect for its rich history and core functions while also attending to three contemporary priorities: (1) Increasing Membership. Like many associations, ASR membership has ebbed in recent years amid challenges posed by Covid-19, travel funding, and more. I will leverage opportunities to rethink and extend the ways we attract, support, and connect scholars from around the globe. (2) Re-invigorating the Annual Meeting. Honoring our long-standing and productive synergies with ASA alongside newer hybrid models, I will revisit how we organize our gatherings as a means of increasing ASR conference participation. (3) Activating Council. My leadership will centrally engage the expertise and wisdom of ASR’s elected Council members, galvanizing collaboration and networks in support of ASR’s mission and core activities. Together with Council, executive office, membership, and broader publics, we can strengthen ASR’s long-standing commitment to scholarly community, support, and voice both now and into the future.

Secretary (2022-2025)

Maureen Day is the Assistant Professor of Religion and Society at the Franciscan School of Theology and Research Fellow at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University. She is a sociologist of religion and award-winning author. Her books include Catholic Activism Today (NYU 2020) and Young Adult American Catholics (Paulist 2018). She has received funding for her research from University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society, U.S. Catholic bishops, Religious Research Association, Villanova University’s Center for Church Management, and more. She regularly interfaces with the media and speaks to general audiences so that our research on religion and society can make its way into the public. Maureen is on the membership committee for the Association for the Sociology of Religion. She looks forward to connecting with ASR members over hot-off-the-press research findings and local beer each year.

Council Members

Term: 2022-2025

Gary J. Adler, Jr. (@GaryAdlerJr) is Associate Professor of Sociology at Pennsylvania State University. His research broadly examines the cultural dimensions of religious organizations and civic action, appearing in Sociological Theory, Sociology of Religion, JSSR, among others. His current project is a collaborative study of religion-state (“church-state”) interaction in municipalities across the United States, focused on how religious leaders and public officials understand, manage, and negotiate interaction at the local level. His study of how progressive religious organizations produce empathy for distant suffering through immersion travel, Empathy Beyond U.S. Borders: the Challenges of Transnational Civic Engagement (Cambridge 2019), won Honorable Mention from the Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section of the American Sociological Association. He is editor of two book on changes in Catholicism, including American Parishes: Remaking Local Catholicism (Fordham 2019). His research has been supported by SSSR, ASR, RRA, ARNOVA, and the Louisville Institute.

Conrad Hackett (Ph.D., Princeton University, 2008) is Associate Director of Research and Senior Demographer at Pew Research Center. His research focuses on global religious change and the demographic characteristics of religious groups. He has published in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals and is an author of Pew reports including The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050, Religion and Education Around the World, The Gender Gap in Religion Around the World, Europe’s Growing Muslim Population, The Age Gap in Religion Around the World and Religion’s Relationship to Happiness, Civic Engagement and Health Around the World. He is a board member of the International Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion (RC22) and Sociology of Population (RC41) research committees. He serves on the editorial boards of Sociology of Religion and the Review of Religious Research. Previously, he was the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s international travel committee chair, a board member and program chair for the Religious Research Association, and a best paper prize committee member for the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association. His research has been recognized with prizes from the European Association for Population Studies, the Population Association of America and the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association. He was named one of the most influential think tank experts on Twitter by Spanish think tank esglobal and Washingtonian magazine described him as “one of the world’s most exciting demographers.”

Philip Schwadel is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Before that, he received his PhD from Penn State and was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the National Study of Youth and Religion. His research focuses on Americans’ religious and political behaviors—and the intersections between the two—with emphases on the associations between religion and social class, social contexts, social change, and youth. Professor Schwadel’s work appears in generalist journals such as Social Forces, Social Science Research, and Contexts; and in disciplinary journals including Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Criminology, and Environment & Behavior. He has further contributed to the discipline by serving on several SSSR/RRA and ASA Religion Section program and award committees, by serving on the ASR Nominations Committee, by serving as the Secretary for RRA, and by being a member of the Sociology of Religion and JSSR Editorial Boards.

Term: 2023-2026

Rebecca Catto is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Kent State University. Rebecca served as Program Chair for the 2022 Association for the Sociology of Religion Annual Meeting. She is a member of the AAR Sociology of Religion Unit Steering Committee and served as Convenor of the British Sociological Association Sociology of Religion Study Group 2013 – 2016, all part of her commitment to serving the field. She gained her PhD in Sociology from the University of Exeter following a Masters in the Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at King’s College London and BA in Theology at Oxford University. Prior to joining Kent State, she worked at the London School of Economics, the University of Westminster, Lancaster University, Coventry University, and Newman University in the UK. Her current research focuses on science and religion, nonreligion, and social studies of science. She is an honorary research fellow at the University of Birmingham. Rebecca’s publications include articles in Acta Sociologica, Public Understanding of Science, Sociology Compass, and The Sociological Review, as well as the co-edited volume Religion and Change in Modern. She is currently Co-Principal Investigator on the £3.4 million ‘Science and Religion, Exploring the Spectrum: A Global Perspective’ research project running in 8 countries. Rebecca also holds an academic year 2022 – 2023 fellowship with Kent State’s Center for Teaching and Learning to research equitable and effective assessment strategies, and she and colleagues recently received NSF funding to develop the podcast ‘How do you know?’ about data and beliefs. She brings her experience in and commitments to public sociology and to international research to her Council service.

Jaime Kucinskas is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Hamilton College. In her research, she examines the multi-institutional contexts in which people experience spiritual states and meaningfulness, as well as the constitutive institutional conditions under which people engage in moral-sensemaking. She is the author of The Mindful Elite and co-editor of Situating Spirituality: Context, Practice and Power (Oxford University Press). Her work has been published in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal for the Social Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Religion, Social Movement Studies, and other academic and popular outlets. She has also served as the Book Review Editor for the Sociology of Religion journal and on awards committees for the ASA Sociology of Religion and Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity sections.

Sadia Saeed is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco (USF). She received her PhD from University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Before joining USF, she held postdoctoral fellowships at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and Yale University’s sociology department. Professor Saeed is a historical sociologist with substantive interests in religion and politics, international human rights, and global inequalities. Her first book Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan (Cambridge, 2017) examines the contentious relationship between Islam, nationalism, and rights of religious minorities in colonial India and Pakistan. She is currently working on a comparative and historical project that investigates how the place of religion in Indo-Persian societies has changed in the course of the transitions from pre-modern to early modern, and then to modern, forms of rule. Her research has been published in European Journal of Sociology, Theory & Society, Studies in Ethnicity & Nationalism, Political Power & Social Theory, Modern Asian Studies, and Critical Research on Religion among numerous other journals and edited volumes. Professor Saeed is active in the Religion network of Social Science History Association and has previously served on the program committee of American Sociological Association’s Global and Transnational Sociology section.

Term: 2024-2027

Jonathan S. Coley is Associate Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University and incoming Editor-in-Chief of The Sociological Quarterly. His research projects examine LGBTQ student activism at Christian colleges and universities, religious and secular student groups at U.S. colleges and universities, local-level religion-state relations in the United States, and LGBTQ faith leaders in the United States. His first book, Gay on God’s Campus, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018, and he is currently working on an edited volume entitled LGBTQ Religious Activism (with Golshan Golriz). His research has also been published in journals such as American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Contexts, Sociology of Religion, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His research has been recognized through awards from the American Sociological Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and his research has been funded through grants from the National Science Foundation, the Louisville Institute, the Public Religion Research Institute, and the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Finally, he serves as an editorial board member for Sociology of Religion.

Nicolette Manglos-Weber is currently an Associate Professor of Religion and Society at Boston University School of Theology. Since coming into the profession, I have been committed to serving the Association for the Sociology of Religion by broadening conversations with related disciplines and international scholarship. First, my publications consistently bring the sociology of religion in conversation with cultural sociology, political sociology, social ethics, and psychology. I am also appointed in an interdisciplinary program, training future leaders in religious and para-religious spaces. Second, my research is global and transnational, bringing new cases and unique empirical data to bear on the conversations in our field. For example, I am currently completing a book project on Christian and Muslim congregational life, community-based care efforts, and interfaith cooperation in Uganda. If elected to the ASR council, I would continue to advocate for greater interdisciplinary and transnational engagement within the sociology of religion.

Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Institutional Flourishing Lab at The Catholic University of America. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business Administration from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and HEC Montreal respectively, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. Brandon’s research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, and scientific institutions, and has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals. He is author of Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2019) and co-author of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019). His ongoing research examines aesthetics and spirituality among scientists and the relationship between religion and innovation.