Winnifred Fallers Sullivan is a Visiting Scholar at the American Bar Foundation. She is the Provost Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Sullivan is also an Affiliate Professor of Law Emeritus at Maurer School of Law, and the former Director of the IU Center for Religion and the Human. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Sullivan’s research focuses on the phenomenology of religion under the modern rule of law. Sullivan has training in law and religious studies, and she has taught in both law schools and in religious studies departments; she practiced law after graduating from law school and later returned to graduate school to study religion. From this interdisciplinary background, Sullivan focuses on the intersection of religion and law in the US within a broader comparative field, both theoretically and cross-culturally. Within legal studies, her work falls broadly in sociolegal and critical legal studies.
Sullivan is the author of many books, most recently The Abyss or Life is Simple: Reading Knausgaard, Writing Religion (with coauthors Courtney Bender, Jeremy Biles, and others, University of Chicago Press, 2022), Church State Corporation: Construing Religion in US Law (University of Chicago Press, 2020), and Ekklesia: Three Inquires in Church and State (with coauthors Paul Christopher Johnson and Pamela E. Klassen, University of Chicago Press, 2018). Her latest book, Making a King: The Political Theology of Joan of Arc, is expected from Columbia University Press in 2026. Sullivan is also editor or contributor to many other books. Her research has been published in Law and Society Review, Religious Studies Review, Journal of the American Academy for Religion, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, American Religion, and elsewhere.