About

Mark Oppenheimer, Ph.D. is a professor of practice and editor of the journal Religion & Politics at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, at Washington University. Oppenheimer holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University and has taught at Stanford, Wesleyan, Wellesley, NYU, Boston College, and Yale, where he was the founding director of the Yale Journalism Initiative. From 2010 to 2016, he wrote the “Beliefs” column, about religion, for The New York Times, and he has also written for publications including The New Yorker, The Nation, GQ, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and many more. He created Unorthodox, the world’s most popular podcast about Jewish life and culture, with over 7 million downloads. More recently, he hosted an eight-part podcast called Gatecrashers, about the history of Jews and antisemitism at Ivy League schools. He is the author of five books, including The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia and, most recently, Squirrel Hill: The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood. He is currently working on a biography of children’s author Judy Blume.

Lincoln A. Mullen, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and a Professor of History at George Mason University. Mullen is the author of America’s Public Bible: A Commentary (Stanford University Press, 2023), an interactive scholarly work that uncovers the history of the Bible in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States using computational methods. In 2016, a prototype of that project won the Chronicling America Data Challenge from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also wrote The Chance of Salvation: A History of Conversion in America (Harvard University Press, 2017), which traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion is a matter of individual choice. That book won the 2018 Best First Book in the History of Religions prize from the American Academy of Religion.

John G. Turner, Ph.D. is the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at George Mason University. Turner is the author of several books about the history of religion in the United States, including Brigham Young (Harvard University Press, 2012) and They Knew They Were Pilgrims (Yale, 2020). He is the co-PI of RRCHNM’s American Religious Ecologies Project and PI of its Pandemic Religion project.

Britt P. Tevis, J.D./Ph.D., is the Phyllis Backer Assistant Professor in Jewish Studies in the Department of History at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her work focuses on the intersection of Jews and American law with a special emphasis on the study of antisemitism.

Zev Eleff, Ph.D. is the president of Gratz College. He is the author or editor of nine books and more than fifty scholarly articles in the fields of Jewish Studies and American Religion. He has received numerous awards, including the American Jewish Historical Society’s Wasserman Prize and the Rockower Award for Excellence by the American Jewish Press Association. Eleff is a key partner in RRCHNM’s Collecting These Times project.

Jeanette Patrick is the Head of R2 Studios. She is a public historian and has an M.A. in Public History from James Madison University. Patrick oversees the development and production of all R2 Studios’ podcasts including The Green Tunnel, Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant, Worlds Turned Upside Down, and Antisemitism U.S.A: A History. Patrick previously worked in the museum industry where she played a pivotal role in creating digital public history projects. She worked at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, where won a silver Telly Award for a visitor center film she wrote entitled “George Washington and the Pursuit of Religious Freedom.” She also wrote scripts for audio and AR tours, live-action films, and animated videos. With Jim Ambuske, Patrick co-created and co-wrote the podcast Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon which was a finalist for the 2021 People's Choice Podcast Award.

Jim Ambuske, Ph.D. is Co-Head of R2 Studios. He is a historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 2016 and he is the author and co-author of several publications on the American Revolution, transatlantic legal history, and King George III. At R2 Studios, Ambuske researches, writes, and narrates Worlds Turned Upside Down. He also oversees the production of The Green Tunnel, Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant, and Antisemitism U.S.A: A History. Before joining R2 Studios, Ambuske led the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, where he hosted and produced the podcast, Conversations at the Washington Library and with Jeanette Patrick co-created and co-wrote the podcast series, Intertwined: The Enslaved Community at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. He is also a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law Library, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalouge Project and the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project.