meet the QTR editorial team
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Dr. Melissa Wilcox
co-editor
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Dr. Joseph Marchal
co-editor
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Dr. Thelathia "Nikki" Young
associate editor
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Dr. Max Strassfeld
associate editor
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Dr. Jeanine Viau
creative editor
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Amina Shumake
creative editor
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Dr. Evren Savcı
book editor
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Deoin Cleveland
managing editor
biographies
co-editors
Dr. Melissa Wilcox
(any pronouns with respect)
Melissa M. Wilcox (any pronouns) is Professor and Holstein Family and Community Chair of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where Dr. Wilcox organizes the annual UCR Conference on Queer and Trans Studies in Religion and the Holstein Dissertation Fellowship. A specialist in the study of gender, sexuality, and religion in the Global North/Global West, Dr. Wilcox has authored or edited eight books, including most recently Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody; Queer Religiosities: An Introduction to Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion; the Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Studies in Religion; and (with Nina Hoel and Liz Wilson) Religion, the Body, and Sexuality. Dr. Wilcox is founding co-editor with Ashon T. Crawley and Tamara C. Ho of the Hauntings book series at New York University Press, founding co-editor with Joseph A. Marchal of the new journal, QTR: A Journal of Queer and Transgender Studies in Religion, and editor of the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Queer and Trans Studies in Religion. Dr. Wilcox’s current research is on the intersection of religion, spirituality, kink, and leather as a site of healing in queer, trans, and BIPOC communities.
Dr. Joseph Marchal
(any pronouns with respect)
Joseph A. Marchal is Professor of Religious Studies and affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at Ball State University. A biblical scholar focused on a range of critical theories of interpretation and histories of reception, they are the author, editor, or coeditor of 12 books, including: Trans Biblical: New Approaches to Interpretation and Embodiment in Scripture (with Melissa Harl Sellew and Katy Valentine, 2025); Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters (2020; paperback in 2022); After the Corinthian Women Prophets: Reimagining Rhetoric and Power (2021); Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles (2019); and Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies (2017). Dr. Marchal also served as the founding chair of the Society of Biblical Literature’s first-ever Committee for LGBTIQ+ Scholars and Scholarship and founding co-editor with Melissa W. Wilcox of the completely fee-free and open-access journal, QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion. Dr. Marchal’s current research projects circle around “bad feelings” and getting a different feel for the people in the first century communities that sparked, received, recirculated, and repurposed the letters we now call “Paul’s;” lingering over the “edges” of these epistles and assemblies for vexing issues in the present; as well as collaborating on queer and trans commentaries and companions to the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity.
associate editors
Dr. Max Strassfeld
(he/they)
Max Strassfeld is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Southern California. They have research interests in rabbinics and late antiquity, trans studies, and Jewish studies. His first book, Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature, was published by the University of California Press in 2022 and was the recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s award for excellence in textual studies. Their work has been published in TSQ and JFSR amongst other places. He was the recipient of a Crosscurrents fellowship, a Frankel fellowship at the University of Michigan, and the Berlin Prize.
Dr. Thelathia "Nikki" Young
(she/her)
Thelathia "Nikki" Young is vice president for institutional equity and access, professor of religion, and professor of gender and sexuality studies. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University, M.Div. and Th.M. from Candler School of Theology at Emory, and B.A. in biology from UNC-Asheville. Her research focuses on the intersection of ethics, family, race, gender, and sexuality, and she is interested in the impact of queerness on moral reasoning. Nikki has published three books. The first, a solo-authored monograph, is titled Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination and was published in 2016. The second, a collaborative project with Drs. Eric Barreto and Jake Myers (fellow GDR alums), titled In Tongues of Mortals and Angels: A De-Constructive Theology of God-Talk in Acts and Corinthians and was published in 2018. Nikki’s latest book Queer Soul and Queer Theology: Ethics and Redemption in Real Life, written with Dr. Laurel Schneider, was published by Routledge in 2021. Nikki is currently working on a new manuscript, tentatively titled We Plead the Blood of Freedom: A Transnational Ethics of Black Queer Liberative Practice.
creative editors
Dr. Jeanine Viau
(she/her)
Jeanine Viau is Associate Lecturer of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida and has published in popular and scholarly venues on contemporary Catholicism, queer studies in religion, feminist theology and pedagogy, and religion and fashion. She is co-editor with Otto von Busch of Silhouettes of the Soul: Meditations on Fashion, Religion, and Subjectivity (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Amina Shumake
(she/her)
Amina Shumake is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. Her research examines how the revelatory nature of salvation is entangled with U.S. reproductive slavery and auctioneering practices, which function as both anti-Black aesthetic formations and queerphobic configurations. With a deep commitment to African American visual art and Black religious history, her work also engages curation as a queer spiritual practice. Drawing on the insights of Clyde C. Taylor and Katherine McKittrick, she approaches curation as an act of methodological disobedience—a sifting practice that resists the exhaustion and self-rejection that results from anti-Black and queer phobic discourse. Instead, she turns to creative practices that not only reveal but releases the texture and tenor of religious life.
book editor
Dr. Evren Savcı
(she/her)
Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, DUP) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her second book project, Monogamy and its Discontents, turns to the political economy of monogamy. In it, she discusses the establishment of it as a central tenet of civilized sexual morality, and attends to the current neoliberal incorporation of its alternatives and restoration of it distributive logic. She is the co-editor of the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue "Transnational Queer Materialism" with Rana M. Jaleel (UC Davis), and her work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory & Event, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, GLQ, and New Perspectives on Turkey, and in several edited collections. Savcı received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Southern California, and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Sociology from University of Virginia. Following her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral fellow at The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN).
managing editor
Deoin Cleveland
(he/him)
Deoin Cleveland is a third year PhD student in the Study of Religion at the University of California, Riverside. He earned his degree in Religious Studies at California State University, Long Beach, where he served as president of the Religious Studies Student Society and received the Distinguished Undergraduate Award. He is a Master of Divinity student at Cherry Hill Seminary with a focus on ministry, advocacy and leadership. Deoin's research focuses on analytics of power, queer studies in religion, changing identities in religious spaces, and spirituality in wellness and healing. Deoin’s primary work is with communities of theatrical performers looking at the intersections of religion, popular culture, queer studies, and metaphysical spiritual seekers.