Laura McTighe served as Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College from 2017 to 2019, with an affiliation in the Department of Religion. During her tenure, she organized and convened several public events funded by the Society of Fellows and co-sponsored by the Religion Department, including "Spiritual healing as politics otherwise in California," "Religious Freedom and US Empire," and "Medicalizing the Souls of Black Folk." Her research project at Dartmouth, titled "Moral Medicine," examined how turn-of-the-century prison officials merged religion and eugenics inside women’s reformatories. McTighe brings to her scholarship over twenty years of grassroots organizing to end state violence and advance community healing, including long-term partnership with Women With a Vision, a Black feminist collective in New Orleans founded in 1989. Her dissertation at Columbia University focused on geographies of resistance prompted by the firebombing of Women With a Vision after Hurricane Katrina, and her first book project explored ethnography of HIV-positive Muslim women’s AIDS activism in Philadelphia and Cape Town, South Africa.

McTighe earned her Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University in 2017. She is now Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University and co-founder of Front Porch Research Strategy, a Black feminist applied institute for participatory research in the South. She has contributed to movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons for more than twenty-five years, co-founding projects such as TEACH Outside, Prison Health News, Project UNSHACKLE, and the Tallahassee Bail Fund. Her research centers collaborative knowledge production as theory and method for analyzing violences of gendered racial capitalism and building liberatory futures, with interests in race, religion, abolition, mutual aid, and Black feminist liberation. Key publications include Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (Duke University Press, 2024, co-authored with Women With a Vision), which received the 2025 Edie Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing; "Front porch revolution: Resilience space, demonic grounds, and the horizons of a black feminist otherwise" (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2018); "Theory on the ground: Ethnography, religio-racial study, and the spiritual work of building otherwise" (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2020); "The ground on which we stand: making abolition" (Journal for the Anthropology of North America, 2020); and editor of the "Religio-Racial Identity" forum (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2020). She serves as principal investigator on two Henry Luce Foundation-funded public humanities projects: “Creating the World Anew: Religion, Economy, and Mutual Aid” and “The Callie House Project: Religion and Public Health in the Black Experience in the American South,” aligning with her forthcoming book Abolition is Sacred Work.

Professional Email: lmctighe@fsu.edu