Born and raised in California, Rosemary R. Corbett

became a New York City transplant in 2003, upon beginning a doctoral program in North American religions at Columbia University. Almost twenty years and five degrees and certificates later, Rosemary is still in the city--although she did commute to Boston for two years for a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University (2010-2012). Having served also as an American Fellow with the American Association of University Women, a Mellon Graduate Fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, a Young Scholar in American Religion with the Center for Religion and American Culture, a Research Fellow with the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, and having taught humanities classes (religious studies, philosophy, gender studies, and American studies) for Columbia, New York, and Tufts universities over the last decade (as well as a summer program in the Middle East), she now occupies a position that brings her more fulfilling engagement than any other experience in her career thus far: teaching humanities classes in men's maximum security facilities for the Bard Prison Initiative--one of the only prison education programs in the country to award college degrees. 

    ROSEMARY'S publications to date include one monograph, one edited volume, and numerous articles and book chapters on subjects ranging from the pressures on Muslim Americans to act as certain kinds of "moderates" to the promise and perils of American-led international humanitarianism. Her work can be found in American Quarterly, Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion and American Culture, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Islamic Law & Culture, and Comparative Islamic Studies, as well as in the Oxford Online Encyclopedias for Islamic Studies and American Religion. (A more comprehensive list is available on her CV.)

    IN addition to writing and teaching, Rosemary serves on the board of directors of a few nonprofit organizations, among them the Center for Constitutional Rights (an advocacy and justice organization that, in her experience, is among the most tenacious in fighting for the rights of marginalized groups and communities, including those often denied basic protections--immigrants and the incarcerated).