Valerie Cooper

Dr. Valerie Cooper joins CTI as a senior fellow in the fall of 2025.  Holding degrees from Harvard University and Howard University, she will be on loan to CTI from her current faculty appointment at Duke University. The first black woman to earn tenure at Duke Divinity School, she has taught courses there on religion and society, religion and popular culture, and black church studies since 2014. Her book, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans, examines the biblical hermeneutics of Maria Stewart, a pioneering, nineteenth century black woman abolitionist and preacher.

Dr. Cooper is looking forward to focusing on the question that CTI’s director Tom Greggs has posed for the first cohort of scholars he will gather at CTI: What would it look like to develop and apply new, inter-disciplinary theologies of hope in domains where despair prevails, and hope is yearned for? During her time at CTI, Dr. Cooper hopes to convene and participate in conversations and projects to develop theologies of hope and to learn from communities where hope has helped make people more resilient despite the challenges they face.

While at CTI, Dr. Cooper will also continue work on her personal research projects, including two books. Segregated Sundays examines the costs and consequences of racially segregated Christian worship in the US, and Popular Apocalypses: Race, Fiction, and the Dystopian Futures We Fear, considers the ways that science fiction uses racial stereotypes and tropes to foreshadow the end of the American empire.

Eric Gregory

Eric Gregory is Professor of Religion at Princeton University. He is the author of Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (University of Chicago Press, 2008), and articles in a variety of edited volumes and journals, including the Journal of Religious Ethics, Modern Theology, Studies in Christian Ethics, and Augustinian Studies. His interests include religious and philosophical ethics, theology, political theory, law and religion, and the role of religion in public life. In 2007 he was awarded Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. A graduate of Harvard College, he earned an M.Phil. and Diploma in Theology from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and his doctorate in Religious Studies from Yale University. He has received fellowships from the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, the Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization at New York University School of Law. Among his current projects is a book tentatively titled, The In-Gathering of Strangers: Global Justice and Political Theology, which examines secular and religious perspectives on global justice. Former Chair of the Humanities Council at Princeton, he also serves on the the editorial board of the Journal of Religious Ethics and sits with the executive committee of the University Center for Human Values.