William Stell is a Faculty Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at New York University, where he teaches courses on American religions. His areas of expertise include gender and sexuality studies, in particular queer studies; histories of race and racism; and histories of disability. His scholarship has been published in American Religion, Church History, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Theology and Sexuality, with forthcoming pieces in Syndicate and The Immanent Frame. In recent years, he has organized panels that bridge religious studies, queer studies, disability studies, and Black studies for the American Academy of Religion, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Society of Church History.

His first book (under contract with Princeton University Press) recovers the history of an evangelical gay activist network in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. Through an analysis of this network’s surprising successes, the evangelical opposition that it aroused, and the subsequent erasure of its history, the book demonstrates—against both scholarly and popular accounts—that evangelical positions on homosexuality in this period were contested, variable, and vulnerable. Beyond the context of evangelicalism in the twentieth-century United States, the book calls for scholars to more rigorously historicize religious anti-LGBTQ+ positions. The book’s tentative title is Born Again Queer: The History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity.