Wendy Mallette

EDUCATION

• Ph.D., Religious Studies with a graduate certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
• M.A.R.; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Yale Divinity School
• B.A., International Service, Valparaiso University

Wendy Mallette is Assistant Professor of Contemporary American Christianities in the Department of Religious Studies and affiliate faculty in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research brings theoretical, archival and theological methods to bear on questions of gender, sexuality, race and affect across religious studies, Christian thought and gender studies.  

Her first book, Lesbian Feminist Killjoys: Sin, Queer Negativity and Inherited Guilt (NYU Press, November 2026), brings the archives of lesbian feminist movements of the 1960s-1980s into conversation with Christian ideas about sin in order to grapple with anxieties about guilt that haunt queer studies, religious studies, Christian theology and American public life.    

Her next book project, tentatively titled “Don’t Pray for Me: Disagreement, Lesbians, and the Christian Right,” focuses on contestations between and among lesbians and conservative Christian women in the U.S. in the late twentieth century. The project delves into artistic works—music, poetry, photography and literature—created by lesbians to respond to homophobia, white supremacy and misogyny among Christians. Her published and forthcoming work can be found in QTR: A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion, Religion Compass, Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, Feminist Theology and Religion Dispatches.     

She is part of the 2025-2027 Young Scholars in American Religion Cohort at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’s Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture. From 2024-2025, she was a Research Associate and Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology and Women’s Studies in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School.      

She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies (Theology) and a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from Yale University.  She also holds a Master of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School and a B.A. from Valparaiso University.