Dr. Ambrose’s work is concerned with Black trans and queer spiritualities and religious expressions as they inform communal healing and activism. Looking to archives, cultural productions, and autoethnographic research as resources moral imagination, I am interested in how practices engaging the sacred have/may shape social change toward more just futures.
El/yse Ambrose, Ph.D. (they/them)* is a blackqueer ethicist, creative, and educator whose research, art, and teaching lie at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and spirituality/religion.
Ambrose’s forthcoming book, A Blackqueer Ethics: Embodiment, Possibility, and Living Archive (T&T Clark [London], Enquiries in Embodiment, Sexuality, and Social Ethics series) offers a construction of a communal-based ethics of sexuality and grounded in blackqueer archive. Their artistic work-in-progress, mycountryboy|what do i know, is a photo-sonic study of Ambrose’s paternal roots that addresses themes of place, opacities, monstrosity, and religion.
Their research has been supported by Columbia University’s Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Yale University LGBT Studies Fellowship, the Mellon Humanities Fellowship, and the Louisville Institute. Ambrose’s research interests include black religion, religious ethics, religion and social change, queer and trans studies in religion, and spiritual traditions of the U.S. South.
*I am both Elyse and El. As a blackqueer gender ambiguous person, my names are my primary referents. However, in line with English language conventions, “they/them” are appropriate pronouns to employ.
Office: CHASS INTN 2008