Nichole Renee Phillips
Nichole Renée Phillips is the associate professor in the practice of sociology of religion and culture and director of Black church studies at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. A sociologist of religion and public theologian, she teaches courses in community and congregational studies. Her research interests lie at the intersection of religion and American public life with a focus on community and congregational studies where she investigates the moral commitments and vision of community and congregational members. Her scholarship treats religion, critical race, gender, and cultural memory studies. She is also developing new research interests in the sociology of science and religion.
Her first monograph, Patriotism Black and White: The Color of American Exceptionalism (2018) is a study of blacks and whites in a rural southern community and their shifting interpretations of American national identity and U.S. exceptionalism with the election of Barack H. Obama as America’s first president of African descent and at the height of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The volume further considers the implication of these patriotic and exceptionalist meanings under the Trump Administration. In 2019, Patriotism Black and White landed on the Best Sellers List for the Christian ecumenical and flagship magazine of U.S. mainline Protestants, The Christian Century. The text also showcases a sociology of how blacks and whites in this rural and southern community think about science (e.g., reproductive choice, technologies, and contraception), demonstrating the ways in which scientific beliefs shape townsfolk religious identities and vice versa.
The Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Religion and the Humanities, Phillips was the first fellow in Emory University’s Mellon Foundation Humanistic Inquiry Program (HIP) to be appointed at the professional schools. She is a senior faculty fellow at Emory University’s Center for Ethics and associate faculty in Emory’s department of sociology. She received the A.B. from Wellesley College, an M.Div. from Harvard University’s Divinity School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in religion, psychology, and culture with a minor in anthropology of religion from Vanderbilt University.
