Heather Rachelle White serves as the Status Committee Director on the AAR’s Board of Directors.
White 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 unceded 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.