People

2009-10 Research Associates and Visiting Faculty

Susan Crawford Sullivan

Colorado Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Sociology of Religion

Susan Crawford Sullivan is Assistant Professor of Sociology and an Edward Bennett Williams Fellow at the College of the Holy Cross, where she teaches courses in the sociology of religion, Catholic social teaching, and community organizing. At Holy Cross, she is also a member of the Women's and Gender Studies department. She received an MPA from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1996 and a PhD in sociology from Harvard University in 2005. During graduate school, she was a National Science Foundation Doctoral Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and a doctoral fellow at the Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations, both at Harvard Kennedy School.

She has academic interests in religion, poverty and public policy, family, voluntarism, and community-based learning. Her articles on the role of religion in low-income mother's work-lives and parenting practices have appeared in Sociology of Religion and Review of Religious Research. She received a 2009 Christian Faith and Life Grant from the Louisville Institute, a Lilly Endowment program for study of American religion.

At Harvard Divinity School, she will continue work on the book manuscript, Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty. This project explores personal faith and organized religion in the lives of low-income urban mothers, based on interviews with women and pastors. While rejecting a reductive notion of religion in poor women's lives, the book argues that both organized and personal religion can provide important resources to poor urban mothers facing difficult challenges. She will also be working on several related articles on low-income women and church participation, as well as religiosity and gender role expectations for poor mothers.

Photograph courtesy the College of the Holy Cross..