for a formal CV, contact me
education:
Yale University, PhD, ABD in Religious Studies, spring 2026
– concentration in theology
– dissertation: “A Heart That Longs / for Lovers”: Gay Theology, AIDS, and the Church
– committee: Linn Marie Tonstad + Kathryn Lofton (advisors), Kathryn Tanner, Langdon Hammer, Mark D. Jordan
Yale Divinity School, MAR in Religion and Literature, 2018
– Berkeley Divinity School, certificate in Anglican Studies, 2018
– Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music, certificate, 2018
Seattle Pacific University, BA in English Literature, 2015, honors program
– during college, I spent two terms at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford
book projects:
1. I am editing a collection of Tim Dlugos’s prose.
2. I am writing a memoir in personal essays: an erotic spiritual autobiography of a gay Christian theologian.
books:
Coarse Work: Essays in Theology and Gay Life (Homodoxy, 2023), limited run of 200. (Very few copies left.)
personal and critical essays:
“Fullness,” The Audacity (May 2025)
“Soft,” Cephalophore (March 2025)
“Good Gay God,” The Rearview (September 2024)
“On Frank O’Hara’s ‘Cornkind,’” Annulet (April 2024)
“Cocooning,” Longreads (May 2023)
academic articles:
“Steam Room Devotions,” Theology and Sexuality (forthcoming)
“John Rechy’s Sodomites,” Literature and Theology, 35:3, (September 2021)
“HIV/AIDS Ecclesiology and Ruptures of the Body,” The Polyphony (June 2021)
poetry:
“metamorphoses” + “beginner’s etude,” &Change, No. 9 (May 2025)
reviews:
Chris Greenough’s Queer Theologies at Reading Religion (2021)
teaching resources:
“Teaching Queer Christian Theology [Where It Can’t Be Taught],” an online teaching module for the Engaging Religion project at Indiana University’s Center for Religion and the Human
other writing:
False Journal entries, Divagations Magazine, forthcoming
teaching and professional development:
The Yale Review
Assistant Editor, Fall 2023 – Summer 2025
Yale Divinity School
Dr. Willie James Jennings’s Introduction to Theology, teaching fellow, Fall 2021
Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman’s Introduction to Christian Ethics, teaching fellow, Spring 2022
Dr. Willie James Jennings’s Systematic Theology, teaching fellow, Spring 2023
Yale College
Dr. Langdon Hammer’s Poetry Since 1950, teaching fellow, Fall 2022
presentations:
“Fraternity: In Pleasure and Death,” Gay Men and Religion Unit, American Academy of Religion, San Diego, CA. November 25, 2024.
“Surfaces and the Study of Religion,” panelist, the American Academy of Religion’s Graduate Student Committee and the Society of Biblical Literature’s Students in the Profession Committee, American Academy of Religion, San Diego, CA. November 25, 2024.
lecture on “Cornkind” by Frank O’Hara, Poetry Since 1950, taught by Dr. Langdon Hammer, September 20, 2022.
“Silence, Pleasure, Contagion: Queerness and the Church from the Unspeakable Sin to Don’t Say Gay,” Introduction to Christian Ethics, taught by Dr. Eboni Marshall Turman, Yale Divinity School, April 19, 2021.
“Gay Ambivalence,” Gay Men and Religion Unit, American Academy of Religion, San Antonio, TX, 2021.
“Theology and the Desire for Otherwise Words,” Theology and Religious Reflection Unit, American Academy of Religion, San Antonio, TX, 2021.
“Narrating the Genre of HIV/AIDS Poetry,” HIV/AIDS in the 21st Century: Memorialisation, Representation, and Temporality, University of Manchester, UK, January 17, 2020.
“Entering Sodom,” Gay Men and Religion Unit, American Academy of Religion, San Diego, CA, November 23, 2019.
“you are of me, that’s what: Frank O’Hara, Fertility, and the Future,” Yale Institute of Sacred Music colloquium presentation, New Haven, CT, March 1, 2017.
awards and nice things:
I’ve been awarded a FLAGS (Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies) Award from Yale’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies program to support archival research on gay liberation theology and HIV/AIDS for my dissertation.
My presentation “you are of me, that’s what” was awarded the ISM Students’ Choice for Best Colloquium Prize. Christian Wiman called it “one of the best [colloquium presentations] I have seen in a while…. quite moving.” Peter Hawkins called it a “tour de force…. one of the finest explications de textes I can recall.”
I was awarded the Arksey Prize by the English faculty of Seattle Pacific University for the best critical essay by a student in 2015.
My thesis on Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit was awarded a de Jager Prize by the faculty of Scholarship and Christianity in Oxford (SCIO) in 2015.
samuel ernest 