Dr. Mary Churchill, Ph.D. (Cherokee) is an associate faculty member teaching in Humanities and Religious Studies. She began teaching at SRJC in January 2013. She also teaches at Sonoma State University in the departments of Native American Studies, American Multicultural Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies.

Dr. Churchill earned a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Under the guidance of Dr. Inés Talamantez (Mescalero Apache), she specialized in the study of American Indian religious traditions, and women and religion. Dr. Churchill also had the good fortune to have been mentored for many years by Dr. Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna/Lakota). She has worked with American Indian faculty, staff, and student organizations on Indigenous initiatives on several college campuses, including the University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Iowa, Sonoma State University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Dr. Churchill’s scholarship has appeared in the American Indian Quarterly, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, as well as in Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations, edited by Inés Hernández-Ávila (Nez Perce). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Dr. Churchill supports and advisors the Native American Summer Bridge Program in her position as Coordinator of the Native American Center (NAC) at SRJC.