2020 - present

The Religion and the Public Conversation project is an initiative of Center Director Jonathan Gold. It aims to raise the level of the conversation around issues of religion in public discourse, bringing value to the scholarly community both here at Princeton and at large, and also the greater public. We are employing a team of Princeton graduate students, who receive professional training in communications and the more technical aspects of audio and visual media production. Then they use this training to conduct interviews with established scholars in the relevant fields. Some of these interviews are held as public events, while others are less formal conversations. These exchanges will all be edited into accessible audio and video media and posted for public and educational use on our website. The production of these materials will benefit the graduate students pedagogically and professionally and benefit the public by providing accurate, current, and relevant content for discussions around religion today. Lauren R. Kerby and Suzanne van Geuns serve as the Postdoctoral Research Associates in Religion and the Public Conversation. Dr. Kerby is pursuing her own research on religion and “deep stories” while advising the graduate student team. Dr. van Geuns joined the team in Fall 2022 to create a methodological toolkit to help graduate students and faculty apply their expertise to social debates about internet culture and infrastructure.