Ruth Braunstein is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. Her research explores the diverse ways in which ordinary citizens across the political spectrum participate in American public life, and the complex roles of religion and culture in these efforts. Her research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Contexts, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Qualitative Sociology, among other outlets.

She is currently completing a book based on a comparative ethnographic study of progressive faith-based community organizing and Tea Party activism, entitled Prophets and Patriots: Faith in Democracy Across the Political Divide (Forthcoming 2017, University of California Press); and an edited volume exploring the role of religion in progressive politics, entitled Religion and Progressive Activism: New Stories About Faith and Politics (Forthcoming 2017, NYU Press).  

Ruth is a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, a core faculty member of the UConn Humanities Institute’s Public Discourse Project, and, during 2015-2016, a Public Discourse Project Faculty Fellow.  During 2014-2015, she was an American Fellow of AAUW.  She is also a member of the Editorial Board of The Immanent Frame, a digital forum on secularism, religion and the public sphere published by the Social Science Research Council’s program on Religion and the Public Sphere.

She holds a 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