Elizabeth M. Freese, PhD is a sociologist of religion focused on the Reproductive Justice movement and serving as Scholar-in-Residence with SACReD (Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity) to support its education and advocacy programs. In other service to the faith and repro movement, she was Associate Director of the online Learning Center at RCRC (Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice), where she co-developed and managed the production of courses, including “Personhood and Fetal Life,” and was a Research Associate with Auburn Seminary, studying public discourse on abortion morality and creating abortion access advocacy resources for Christians.
In her public scholarship, Freese contributes to an understanding of the interactions between Christianity and the politics of reproduction. Her essays have been featured in Salon, Religious Dispatches, Common Dreams, Feminism and Religion, and Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Interventions forum, and she has participated in webinar panels with Drew University’s Forum on Religion and Global Heath, Women’s March, RCRC, and Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Program in Religion and Justice.
Academically, Freese’s research interrogates dynamics between Christian religious constructions in biblical myth and Eucharist ritual, on the one hand, and, on the other, intersectional, feminist justice concerns. Recent publications include “What Grows in the Wilderness?: Feminist and Womanist Liturgical Offerings in a Time of Social Interregnum”(2023) and “Toward Eve’s Exodus: Un-Misrecognizing Androcentric Reproductive Labor Ideology in Christian Right Rhetoric and Genesis 1-3” (2024). She is currently working on her first book Constructing Women: A Feminist Analysis of Reproductive Labor Ideology in Christian Myth and Ritual.
Elizabeth earned a PhD in Religion and Society at Drew University, a MA in Religion at the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest, a MA in Communications at the U of AR, and a BA in Sociology at Barnard College, Columbia University.