CRC Research Fellows and Interns

Carlos Alvarenga (he/him)

Carlos Alvarenga is an independent researcher, author, and coach. Before writing and coaching full-time, he worked as a management consultant and adjunct professor at the University of Maryland. Prior to his current role, he was the Executive Director of World 50 Labs, the member-innovation team at World 50, Inc. Before World 50, he was a Principal in Ernst & Young’s Advisory Practice and, earlier, a Managing Director at Accenture. Originally from El Salvador, Carlos started my career there as a journalist covering the post-war reconstruction before returning to the U.S. A classically trained pianist, he is a lifelong student of the music of the great Bill Evans. He currently resides in Bethesda, MD with his wife, a physician/researcher at N.I.H., and their two sons.

Dominique “Dom” Turner (he/him)

Dom Turner is a Ph.D. student studying higher education administration in the Department of Advanced Studies, Leadership, and Policy at Morgan State University. His research focuses on the historical development of church-based colleges and the relationships that church-based HBCUs maintain with the denominations to which they are affiliated. Dom earned both his master’s degree in public administration and undergraduate degree in government from Bowie State University. He brings extensive experience in team leadership and project management that was cultivated during his formative years as a youth leader in the Christian Education Department of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Professionally, Dom is the Director of Non-Traditional Programs and an adjunct professor at University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC).

Katherine Kunz (she/her)

Katherine Kunz holds a Ph.D. in Practical Theology from the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her dissertation, Contested Home: Asylum-Seeking and Church is an in-depth ethnography that explores concepts of home and examines how churches engage politically in an urban context. Through this research, she developed a model for interviews that prioritizes listening and presence. Katherine also holds an M.A. in Art and Religion from the Graduate Theological Union and an M.Div.-equivalency from the Pacific School of Religion, both in Berkeley, California. She has worked extensively in higher education leadership positions and is a certified professional coach. Katherine’s scholarly interest in contested borders and divided identities traces back to her time growing up in the partitioned city of Berlin during the Cold War as the daughter of a U.S. Army officer. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and son and in her free time enjoys open water swimming, sampling local bakeries, and discovering new city and nature walks.

Dr. Shaeeda Mensah (she/they)

Dr. Shaeeda Mensah is a queer Black feminist scholar and educator. She is a native of Bronx, New York, and a graduate of Spelman College and Pennsylvania State University. She has vast experience teaching and researching in the fields of philosophy, Africana Studies, Queer Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. Her current research focuses on the marginalization of Black women's experiences in analyses of state violence. Shaeeda is a mother to two sons, reading brings her joy, and the dance floor is her happy place.

Carlos Ruiz Martinez (he/him)

Carlos Ruiz Martinez is a doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. He is broadly interested in the history of race and Catholicism in the United States. More specifically, his current work makes use of historical and ethnographic methods and focuses on the role of Catholicism in the development of the St. Louis suburbs and the formation of segregated communities. While much recent work has focused on the history of White Flight in St. Louis, Carlos’ work foregrounds the fact that a majority of those who fled inner ring suburbs like Ferguson, Missouri in the second half of the 20th century were Catholics. Moreover, if the St. Louis suburbs saw drastic demographic changes in terms of race, they also saw drastic religious change. His work explores the connections of those two shifts, and suggests that race and religion are fundamentally related.

Sher Afgan Tareen (he/him)

Sher Afgan Tareen approaches religion as a set of embodied practices that provide healing from the mechanization of work in urbanizing societies. 20th century history of Islam in America serves as his data. Through a life history method of analysis, he highlights the role of Muslim women in America in serving as religious healers, with the key insight that they actively participated in the very reforms in education ushered during the progressive era which had otherwise sought to replace women religious with professionals trained in biomedicine and psychology for the purpose of offering health and healing in industrial cities such as Detroit, Indianapolis, and the Washington D.C. - Baltimore metro area. At CSRC, he designs courses that merge the study of religion and health to equip students with tools that both serve professionally and as social justice activists. He also co-hosts a podcast with Dr. Amanda Furiasse that seeks to build a network of scholars, non-profit workers, artists, museum curators, and health practitioners around imagining what cities will look like as the possibility of working online, encouraging outdoor immersion, and expanding the place of care from clinic to church. 

Abel R. Gomez (he/him)

Abel R. Gómez is a Ph.D. candidate in the Religion Department and earned a Certificate of Advanced Studies from the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Syracuse University. His dissertation examines Indigenous sacred sites protection movements among Ohlone peoples of the San Francisco-Monterey region. He is a member of the Native Traditions in the Americas Unit of the American Academy of Religion and recently served on the committee organizing the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirits Powwow. Abel earned a B.A. in philosophy and religion from San Francisco State University and an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Missouri.

Ariel Mejia (she/her)

My name is Ariel Mejia and I am currently a senior at Grand Valley State University. My major is Global studies and social impact with a minor in African/African American studies. Moreover, my interests include studying African History (primarily the Namibian genocide) as well as, connecting African studies to women studies. I plan on applying to graduate school in the fall and my overall goal is to (hopefully) become a professor. Furthermore, a fun fact about me is last summer I spent 6 weeks studying abroad in Namibia. I am excited to be working this research project and look forward to making connections and learning something new and exciting.

Arion Laws (she/her)

Arion Laws is from Charleston South Carolina and recently graduated from The George Washington University where she majored in Political Science and American Studies. Currently, she is a student at Harvard Graduate School of Education where they study Education Policy and Management. They’re also very passionate about education equity. In their spare time she likes to cook, read, play Scrabble! They am super grateful for the opportunity to do some meaningful research as they have aspirations of pursuing a doctoral degree.

Alexis Frambes (she/her)

Alexis Frambes received her B.A. in History, with a concentration in public history, from George Mason University in December 2019. She currently works as a research associate at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media on two of their ongoing projects, American Religious Ecologies and Pandemic Religion: A Digital Archive. Her previous experience includes an internship with the American Battle Monuments Commission’s Collections and Preservation Directorate; an internship with the National Museum of American History’s Curatorial Division of Military History; and working as a research assistant to Dr. Peter N. Stearns.

Cristina Rosetti (she/her)

Cristina Rosetti holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California, Riverside. Her research examines the history and lived experience of Mormon fundamentalists in the Intermountain West. Her recent work focuses on the impact of criminalization and marginalization on minority Mormon communities who practice polygamy. She is currently completing a biography of Joseph W. Musser, a twentieth-century Mormon fundamentalist leader, under contract with University of Illinois Press.

Fatima Bamba (she/her)

Fatima Bamba was born and raised in Harlem, New York, and is a first-generation Ivorian-American. She received her undergraduate degree in Politics and Law from Bryant University and is currently a graduate student at American University’s School of International Service. Her research interests revolve around human rights and social justice work at the domestic and international levels with a special focus on the Black female Muslim identity. She has a vested interest in Black, Muslim, and female-specific organizing and hopes to amplify their work and advocacy. Over the span of her academic career, she has coordinated diversity and inclusion initiatives, participated in international relations conferences, worked abroad in London as a CSR intern, and is a Diversity & Inclusion Fellow at the Association of Professional Schools for International Relations(APSIA). Fatima employs an Islamic and Black Feminist liberatory praxis. In her free time, she loves to cook, eat, and cultivate communal spaces for others. 

Iman AbdoulKarim (she/her)

Iman AbdoulKarim is a Ph.D. student in Religious Studies at Yale University. Her research interests include race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Islamic ethics. Iman was a 2017-2018 US-UK Fulbright postgraduate scholar at the Centre for the Study of Islam in the U.K. at Cardiff University where she completed her M.A. She received her B.A. from Dartmouth College in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  

Karim Rafiq (he/him)

Karim Amin is an Artist organizer and Educator from Baltimore City. Karim is currently a graduate degree candidate pursuing a Master in Public Administration with a Conflict Management and Negotiations at the University of Baltimore. Karim is a seasoned Community Activist Co founder of Muslim Social Services Agency, a Baltimore based non-profit that provides wrap around social services to underserved urban communities. This Father of three is a writer who has published articles with Huffington Post, CNN, and others. His passion is providing a platform to share stories of underrepresented communities in the United States through arts and culture.

Mofiyinfoluwa Shotayo (she/her)

Mofiyinfoluwa is a Junior at Morgan State University majoring in Philosophy Pre-Law, with a minor in Psychology. She is a goal oriented, multilingual and highly motivated individual.

She is also a tutor at the University's Center for Academic Success and Achievement. Boasting an impressive CGPA of 4.0, Mofiyinfoluwa is known for her academic prowess, exceptional writing skills, and wholehearted dedication towards the bettering of the community by her engagements with various organizations in the rendering acts of service and volunteerism.

Sierra Lynn Lawson (she/her)

Sierra is a doctoral student in the Religion and Culture track in the department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sierra's current work examines competing transatlantic discourses on maternal health within visual and textual archives. She is specifically interested in the devotional labor of “Morisca” women in the Ebro region and women in early Mesoamerican and Andean colonies as mutually influenced by and influencing imperial grammars for classifying ‘religion.’ In studying rhetorics of devotion she has previously focused on communities who describe themselves as Marian—and, specifically, Guadalupan—devotees. You can access her website here

Tommy Lyons (he/him)

Tommy Lyons graduated from Morgan State University on May 20th, 2017 with a Bachelor of Science in Nutrition.  He was awarded the Bernard Osher Scholarship in the fall of 2015. He served as the president of the Morgan’s Eat Right which, under his leadership, began a great collaboration with their university’s chapel, providing awesome lunch and nutrition education for students and faculty every Wednesday at the chapel’s Mid-Week Meditation. Using his culinary talents and nutrition training he helped plan and execute the Annual Jackie Burley Memorial Thanksgiving Dinner for students and essential employees who stayed on campus during the Thanksgiving holiday break. He also participated in the MSU Community Organic Vegetable Garden which provided a great relationship with the community adjacent to our campus. He was inducted into the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, became a member of Morgan State Friends of the Chapel and assisted with the American Cancer Society’s Active for Life Campus Style campaign. He is currently applying to Howard University’s MS in Nutritional Sciences Program. He thanks God for blessing him with a heart to serve my communities.

Yousra Yusuf (she/her)

Yousra Yusuf, MPH is a Ph.D. candidate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research interests are in reproductive health, immigrant health, health disparities, and women’s health in underserved, community-based research settings. She has an extensive background in public health research and teaching in the fields of community health research, health disparities, and health advocacy.

Twitter: @yousray1
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yousrayusuf

Research Assistant Intern | Black Church Food Security Network

Michelle Nkrumah-Boateng is a freshman at Morgan State University, majoring in Information Science and Systems. She is a member of the Clara I. Adams Honors College at Morgan State University. Michelle is interested in working in the field of technology for the analysis, interpretation, and security of data. As a Research Assistant, she will be scheduling phone interns, and organizing and coordinating data. She will also help with the construction of the literature review or report of the data collected from the Black Church Census. With the skills and knowledge that she acquires during her studies, Michelle aims to specialize in the use of software to make data storage, analysis, and security more efficient. Having experienced challenges herself, she hopes to one day be successful enough to be able to help people in need in my community.

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Natalia De Jesus Torres will be working one-on-one with different members of the faculty and staff to develop strategies, data recordings and scheduling for several research projects. She has served as the secretary for Morgan State University's Latin/x Student Association (LSA) for the 2020-2021 academic year. As secretary of the LSA, Natalia worked with members of the executive board to schedule meetings, organize events, contact staff members or collaborating organizations, as well as record minutes and notes at all meetings and events. She worked with several different staff and faculty members to set up events and organize possible future collaborations focusing on social justice, cultural awareness, and social events in the Latin/x community. Natalia is currently a senior at Morgan State University studying Civil Engineering, where she plans to use her knowledge of structural design and construction to eventually help build sustainable infrastructure and plans to study project management in the future to understand how to effectively work collaboratively to develop innovative designs and projects.

Kelly Marroquin - CASA Baltimore Research Fellow

Giselle Toruno - CASA Baltimore Research Fellow