Faculty
Eric Stephen
Assistant Professor, School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies
Courtesy Appointment, Religious Studies
contact
Home Campus: Tampa
Office: SOC 356
Email: emstephen@usf.edu
Education
BA, Wesleyan University, 2013
MTS, Harvard Divinity School, 2016
PhD, Harvard University, 2023
JD, Yale Law School, 2023
bio
I am an interdisciplinary scholar of religion and American law in the United States. My work draws from critical religious studies, political science, and legal theory to examine how the very concept of “religious liberty” has been defined, contested, and enacted over the course of US history. In particular, I am interested in the ways that Americans’ faith commitments have influenced the US Supreme Court’s religious liberty jurisprudence, how those legal precedents have in turn informed religious belief, and how this relationship has shifted throughout American history in response to significant social changes and political events. In my current book project, I explore the ways the rhetoric of "secularism" and the "secular" was invoked in American legal and political discourse in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the role that changing understandings of these categories played in influencing both what Americans popularly understood the term "religion" to mean, and the different visions of religious liberty that emerged as a result. In a second and more contemporary project, I have also been tracking how the legal advocacy efforts of conservative religious activists have affected key religious liberty precedents over the last decade, including Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), the emergence of the ministerial exception doctrine, and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022).
Though my primary research interests surround American legal and religious history, I have a strong background in longitudinal data analysis as well, including publications on US education policy, psychopathology, and post-Soviet indigenous religious revival movements.
At USF, I will be teaching courses on American constitutional law; law and politics; and religion and sexuality.