Sophie Bjork-James

Sophie Bjork-James is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University. She has over ten years’ experience researching both the US-based Religious Right and the white nationalist movements. She is the co-editor of Beyond Populism: Angry Politics and the Twilight of Neoliberalism (West Virginia University Press, 2020). She is the author of The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) which provides an ethnographic account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition in the post-Civil Rights movement United States, providing a theological corollary to Religious Right politics. She is currently developing two projects. One explores anti-racist strategies challenging the white nationalist movement in the Northwestern United States. The other project explores contemporary pro-life activism and the intersection of abortion politics and environmental politics.

Her work has been featured on the NBC Nightly News, NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC Radio 4’s Today programs, ABC’s (Australia) Planet America, and in articles in Reuters, the New York Times, USA Today, and Vox.