Ruth Braunstein is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut and a cultural sociologist interested in the role of religion and morality in American political life. Her research has been published in the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Contexts, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociology of Religion, Theory and Society, and Qualitative Sociology, among other outlets.

Her first book, Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide, is a comparative ethnographic study of progressive faith-based community organizing and Tea Party activism, published by the University of California Press. She is also the co-editor of a volume exploring the role of religion in progressive politics, entitled Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories About Faith and Politics, published by NYU Press. Her current research project, "The Moral Meaning of Taxes," explores how the practices of taxpaying and tax resisting are linked to contested understandings of political community, good citizenship and morality in the United States. 

During 2019-2020, Ruth is the recipient of a Louisville Institute Sabbatical Grant for Researchers, a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Center for the Study of Religion, and a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) Public Fellow. Ruth is also a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University and a core faculty member of the UConn Humanities Institute’s Humility and Conviction in Public Life Project. During 2015-2016, she was a Public Discourse Project Faculty Fellow, and during 2014-2015, an American Fellow of AAUW.  She serves on the Editorial Boards of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociological Forum, Sociology of Religion, Qualitative Sociology and The Immanent Frame, a digital forum on secularism, religion and the public sphere published by the Social Science Research Council.

She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, where she studied international culture and politics.

Ruth Braunstein
Department of Sociology
University of Connecticut
Unit 1068, 344 Mansfield Road 
Storrs, CT 06269
ruth.braunstein@uconn.edu
@RuthBraunstein