LGBTQ-RAN presents the 2023-24 Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Award to Austin Steelman for his paper, “’Not an Ordinary Man:’ J. Gresham Machen & the Un-Queering of Evangelical Theology.  Last year’s Mollenkott Awardee Wallace Best, Ph.D. will interview Steelman about his research and writing.

Read the full press release for more information about Steelman’s award-winning paper.

Austin Steelman is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Stanford, he earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and worked as a litigator in the field of intellectual property law. While in law school, he began his research on the connections between interpretations of legal and religious texts in American history.

Wallace Best, Ph.D. joined the Princeton faculty in 2007 and holds appointments in the Departments of Religion and African American Studies and is a faculty affiliate of the Department of History. He also serves as Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. A scholar of African American religious history, he is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952, Princeton University Press and Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem, New York University Press, winner of the 2018 award in “Textual Studies” from the American Academy of Religion.

Other speakers at this event will include: 

Caro Bratnober (they/she) is the Public Services Librarian at the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary in New York and an alum of Union Theological Seminary. Their library and archival work is informed by her research in gender and sexuality studies, (dis)ability studies, ethics and religious studies, along with digital-media and information-literacy studies. She coordinates research and access services for the Burke Library and across the Columbia University Libraries, and creates exhibits, user-engagement projects, and instruction-design initiatives. They are proud to serve on the Advisory Board of the LGBTQ-RAN.

Rev. Dr. William Stell is a faculty fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at New York University. His scholarship has been published in American Religion, Church History, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Theology & Sexuality. His current book project is titled Born Again Queer: The History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity.

This presentation and reception following is jointly hosted by the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network and Union Theological Seminary.