about the killjoys

Megan Goodwin, PhD, is the founder and co-director of the Bardo Institute for Religion & Public Policy and the media & technology consultant for the Crossroads Project.

Her formal expertise is in issues of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and American religions. Her first book, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecutions, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions is available through Rutgers. (We also talk about it on our religion & pop culture episode!) Her next project is Cults Inc.: The Business of Bad Religion.

She’s a professional explainer of why you should care about religion, even if you’re not religious yourself. (Often she will keep explaining even after you have asked her to stop.) 

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, PhD, is an associate professor of Religion and the director of the Humanities Center at the University of Vermont.

Her formal expertise is in Islam in South Asia, racialization of Muslims, and global histories of imperialism. Her first book, Indian Muslim Minorities & the 1857 Rebellion: Religion, Rebels, and Jihad, is available through Bloomsbury. She is also co-editor of Words of Experience: Translating Islam with Carl W. Ernst (Equinox).

She’s an academic mama with a long last name who enjoys killing joy for great justice. And funsies.