Biography
Heather Rachelle White, Ph.D., is a career contingent scholar, currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender and Queer Studies at the University of Puget Sound, a position they have held for eight years. The University of Puget Sound is a small private liberal arts college located in Tacoma, Washington, on the uncedeed lands of the Puyallup people. Heather received a BA from Eastern College (now Eastern University), an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary, and a Ph.D. in American Religions from Princeton University, graduating in 2007. Heather’s research and writing bring together the study of grassroots social movements, the history of sexuality and gender, and the study of religion and secularism in the twentieth-century United States. They are the author of Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights, published 2015 by University of North Carolina Press; and co-editor, with Gillian Frank and Bethany Moreton, of Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States, published 2018 by the University of North Carolina Press. Heather is currently writing a book about the Episcopal parish that facilitated Stonewall-era queer organizing in New York City. Heather has been a member of the AAR since 2003.
Candidate Statement
I first attended the AAR in 2003 as a graduate student excited to simply listen and learn. I roomed at a local community house and took the bus each day to the Atlanta Convention Center. In the two decades since, I have continued in an implausibly long career as a contingent scholar while remaining active in the leadership of two AAR program units. I served as co-chair of the Religion and Sexuality Group (with Monique Moultrie) from 2009-2014. In 2011, I became a steering committee member of the Queer Studies and Religion Group, and then shifted to co-chair (with Thelathia Young and Brandy Daniels) from 2016-2019. I have also been a mentor for the Committee on the Status of LGBTQI Person in the Profession. Through these years, I have seen the AAR become a more expansive network of scholars and professionals with multiple conferences inside of conferences taking place within the larger conference. At the same time, the AAR as an institution faces more daunting financial challenges as declining structures of higher education and increasingly professional precarity change the mission and the constituencies of academic professional societies. It’s important to ask, amid these shifts: What is the community that the AAR should convene, and what is the role of the students, scholars, researchers, teachers, activists, and communicators in shaping our gatherings?
The most important answers to this question will come from hearing how our diverse constituencies already navigate changing academic and non-academic structures. The work of the Status Committees Director is to serve as a channel for the needs and recommendations of the committees that formally represent four constituencies: people with disabilities, racial and ethnic minoritized people, women and gender minoritized people, and LGBTIQ persons. This role, put simply, is to make sure that recommendations and insights from these marginalized groups have a channel to the deliberations of the Program Committee, which oversees the annual meeting. Input from these committees has already changed our conference gatherings as intellectual, social, and physical spaces. I am standing for election because I’m interested in and committed to the continued transformation of the AAR’s annual conference into a more workable gathering space–for more of us. I am interested, especially, in the effort to accommodate both physical and virtual attendance. The Status Committees have already recommend ways that the AAR can better welcome actual bodies and physical capacities; provide more program space for the ways that marginalized knowledges traverse conventional disciplinary boundaries; support intentional network-building for professional development on and off tenure tracks and inside and outside of academia, to name just a few. The groups that struggle most to be included in academic life are often the ones who are already doing the work of living and creating scholarship outside of its conventional structures. It would be an honor to play a part in the collective restructuring of this guild to provide robust support for unconventional and otherwise-marginalized scholarly and imaginative work.