Susan B. Ridgely

Biography

Susan B. Ridgely is a professor of Religious Studies and director of the Religious Studies Program. She has been at the University of Wisconsin–Madison since 2016. Since arriving at UW–Madison, she served on the Letters and Science Curriculum Committee from 2017-2021, chairing the committee from 2019-2021. She directed the Religious Studies program from 2019-2025. Her main area of research is contemporary religious life in the U.S.

In her research, she uses ethnographic case studies to integrate the category of age into the analytic triad of race, class, and gender in the study of American religious traditions and American culture more broadly. Her most recent book is One True Church: An American Story of Race, Family, and Religion (2026). She is also the author of Practicing What the Doctor Preached: At Home with Focus on the Family (2016) and When I was a Child: Children’s Interpretations of First Communion (2005), as well as editor of The Study of Children in Religions: A Methods Handbook (2011) and The Bloomsbury Reader in Childhood and Religion (2017).