Briallen Hopper is a Lecturer in the Yale English department and a Faculty Fellow at the University Church in Yale. She was previously a Class of 1952 Scholar and Samuel Slie Fellow at Yale Divinity School. She received a Ph.D. in American literature from Princeton in 2010.

Briallen has published academic essays on Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, and Denzel Washington, and her writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Not Coming to a Theater Near You, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is writing two books: Feeling Right in American Reform Culture, on the ethics of emotion in American political reform movements, and Jesus Is On the Mainline, on narratives of religious transformation beyond conversion or the loss of faith.

In 2008 Briallen received the Associate of Princeton Graduate Alumni Teaching Award, Princeton’s highest honor for graduate student teachers. She has taught graduate seminars on American religion at Boston University, Southern Methodist University, and Yale Divinity School, and has taught English, American Studies, African American Studies, and writing at Princeton and Yale. For three years she taught politics and literature to high-achieving, low-income students in New Jersey public high schools through the Princeton University Preparatory Program. For two years she taught writing to pre-med students from under-represented backgrounds through the Summer Medical and Dental Education Program at the Yale School of Medicine.

Dan Savage once called Briallen a future church leader on his blog, and she is doing her best to live up to this description. She spent seven years as a member and church lady at Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey, where she taught Sunday School, served as an interim pianist, and accompanied the Witherspoon Quartet. She has served as a Student Pastor at First Church Congregational in Fairfield, Connecticut, and is a member of Broadway United Church of Christ in New York City.

You can read more from Briallen at http://briallenhopper.tumblr.com/ and https://twitter.com/#!/briallenhopper.

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