Nicole Carroll

Nicole Carroll is a PhD candidate in Religious Studies at Stanford University in the American Religions subfield. Her dissertation, Properties of the Secular: Zoning Religion in the American Carceral State, investigates struggles between municipal governments and racialized religious communities over the creation and habitation of sacred space in the late-twentieth century United States. 

Through three case studies—the violent removal of the Black religious community MOVE from West Philadelphia, the criminalization of Santeria animal sacrifice in South Florida, and a zoning dispute between a Catholic Church and a small city in Texas hill country—Properties of the Secular theorizes the spatial dimensions of secular governance by examining connections between zoning ordinances, the criminalization of religious practices and communities, and the production of urban space from 1975-1997. Using secularism and space as lenses through which to interpret late-twentieth century American religion, Nicole’s work examines religion-making as a dialectical process, created both through hegemonic projects of territorialization and counterhegemonic practices of sovereign reclamation. 

Nicole is an Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) fellow, a former Center for Ethics in Society graduate fellow, and the founding graduate student coordinator of the Critical Carceral Studies Collective, a Stanford Humanities Center research workshop. Nicole’s research is also informed by her work with incarcerated and justice-involved students; she has taught for the Bard Prison Initiative, the Yale Prison Education Initiative, and Stanford’s Hope House Scholars program. She received her MA in the History of Christianity from Yale Divinity School and BA in Religious Studies from Bard College.