My name is Allison Isidore. I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa researching the ways in which gender and race affected the role of both Black and White Catholic women religious in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
I created this website as a resource for online teaching. During the 2020 spring and summer, I assisted journalism professors at William Paterson University who struggled with transitioning their Journalism courses to an online format. The COVID-19 pandemic threw many scholars and teachers into the digital world that previously had little experience and had very little time to prepare and transfer their in-person courses to a digital format. You will find resources on how to use Adobe Premiere Pro to make short lecture videos and add closed captions to videos, Chrome extensions that will help create more engaging conversations with students, Blackboard tips for also creating an engaging environment, and assistive technology for yourself and students that makes working from home or on a laptop a little easier.
In November of 2019, at the National American Academy of Religion conference, I presided over the “The Role and Influence of Private Funding of the Field” panel for the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR). It was a great experience, and in November 2021, I am scheduled to preside over the panel — LEXICON: Crisis as Method in the Study of Religion.
My focus area is the twentieth-century American Civil Rights Movement and its relationship with Catholicism. I believe that this relationship is an understudied area because the majority of scholarship has been on the relationship between Protestantism and the Civil Rights Movement. There might be a reason for this because the American Catholic Church, between the 1950s and 1960s, only made four formal addresses to the “race problem” of the Civil Rights Movement. But Catholic laity saw the Civil Rights Movement as a secular problem that needed a moral response. I also want to focus on how the Catholic Church also informed discourses on race and gender performance during the same time.
Current projects include interviewing Catholic activists involved in the 1965 Selma March for Voters Rights, also known as “Bloody Sunday,” and creating a pedagogical video series using the text Religion in 5 Minutes to engage students on ideas of definitions, habitus, history, and more. You can see some of the videos by clicking on the Religion in 5 Minutes Videos tab above.
