New postdoctoral fellow announced for 2026-2027

The faculty of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis is pleased to announce its newest postdoctoral fellow, Carlos Ruiz Martinez. The fellowship will begin with the 2026-2027 academic year and is renewable for the following year.

Carlos Ruiz Martinez is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies at University of Iowa. His research combines historical and ethnographic research methods and focuses on religion in U.S. public life, immigration and religion, and race and Catholicism in the Americas. His dissertation is titled “Sanctuary, Shelters, and the State: Religion and Immigration Enforcement in the United States,” and illuminates the unlikely cooperation between religion and immigration enforcement in the United States since the 1980s.

The newest awardee joins Chanhee Heo, Laura Simpson, and Zara Surratt, all in their second year of the fellowship. Ruiz Martinez brings to 36 the number of fellows supported by the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics since the inauguration of the program in 2012.

The fellowships are one expression of the Center’s mission to support scholars early in their careers. Fellows work to complete their first book or subsequent projects during their term at the Center, and they actively participate in the intellectual life of the Center and the University through teaching undergraduate students, joining the Center’s biweekly interdisciplinary seminar, and engaging our public programming.

The John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics was established in 2010 and is located on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis. The Center serves as an open venue for fostering rigorous scholarship and informing broad academic and public communities about the intersections of religion and U.S. politics.

For more information about the Center’s fellowship programs, please see http://rap.wustl.edu/fellowships/.