Hannah Thorpe

Doctoral Candidate

Hannah holds a bachelor's degree with majors in both Psychology and Religious Studies from Elon University. At Elon, Hannah was a MultiFaith Scholar, a competitive fellowship program that fosters interreligious scholarship and community building. Her MultiFaith Scholars project entitled “‘Strangers in a Strange Land:’ Jewish Responses to White Nationalism During the Trump Era,” can be found in the Journal for Interreligious Studies. Hannah holds a Masters in Theological Studies, with a concentration in Modern Religious Thought and Experience, from Emory University. Her thesis included archival work on the women’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. 

At Vanderbilt, she has worked on projects that investigate how white evangelicals adopt antiracist commitments, and several projects under the Reproductive Politics Lab that include studying the impacts of the Dobbs decision on reproductive healthcare in Tennessee. Her dissertation will focus on how religion and politics, or what she calls religiopolitics, shape racialized reproductive health experiences of Black mothers in Memphis, Tennessee. In connecting discursive formations to material world, Hannah seeks to expose the ways in which speech acts, political activism, and religious practice can manifest materially and structurally, upholding white supremacist inequalities. She hopes her work contributes to ongoing scholarship on religion and reproductive racism in the United States.

Hannah is a recipient of the University Graduate Fellowship as well as the Harold Stirling Vanderbilt Fellowship and her research has been supported by Vanderbilt’s Summer Research Award. She has received the Research Excellence Award and Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Anthropology.