Stephanie House-Niamke

Stephanie M. House-Niamke is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at West Virginia University (WVU), a Sociology Teaching Fellow at Ferrum College, and a Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) Dissertation Fellow. She has guest-lectured on Critical Race Theory (CRT) at Virginia Tech, American University, and WVU. Since arriving in Morgantown, she has worked with Dr. Katie Corcoran as a summer graduate research assistant and has been invited to speak at workshops addressing systemic racism in business and technology fields. She has also published four papers with WVU sociology faculty, one with Dr. Corcoran concerning multiple church attendance in the United States, another with Dr. Chris Scheitle about advisor-student relationships and demographic matching across race, gender, and religious identities, and two with Dr. Josh Woods concerning the athlete's self-concept and self-branding via social media. In June 2022, she published her first single-authored article, "Hannah's Suffering: The Power of Voice" concerning womanist interpretation of a popular Old Testament scripture and its implications for minoritized women. Currently, she has one solo-authored article under review and one chapter forthcoming in an edited volume.

Broadly speaking, her research interests concern power, access, and choice, across the areas
of race, gender, and religion. This includes anti-racist pedagogy and identity development for
melanin-dominant communities and women who participate in religious institutions. Additionally,
she has published work on BIPOC teachers' resistance to CRT in curricula. She has also
published work focused on incorporating Critical Race Theory into graduate public administration and policy programs as well as general policy-making.

She served as the Student Section Chair for the North Central Sociological Association until April 2023. Her master's thesis, which focused on the impact of the White Jesus Phenomenon on Black
Protestant women and men, was funded by The Joseph H. Fichter Research Grant through the
Association of Sociology of Religion, the Korie Little Edwards Grant, the Student Research
Grant from the Sociology of Religion section of the American Sociological Association and
WVU's prestigious Carl del Signore Scholarship.

For the last two years, she has taught an amazing group of BIPOC, first generation, low-income students at Princeton University via the Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America's 2022 and 2023 Summer Institute in Princeton, New Jersey. The course curriculum focused on utilizing leadership skills and knowledge of social movements/activism to create and facilitate broader social change. She will return again this coming summer.

She is looking forward to working with Black churches and minoritized communities while pursuing a career as a tenure-track professor once she completes her doctoral studies.