Gastón Espinosa, Ph.D.
Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies,
Claremont McKenna College
Dr. Gastón Espinosa did graduate work at Princeton, Harvard, and the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he received his Ph.D. in American History. He arrived at CMC in 2017 and is the Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College. Dr. Espinosa has been a visiting Fellow at Dartmouth College, Northwestern University, an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center Institute for Advanced Studies (NC), and he was named the 2016-2017 William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and Public Life in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. He served two-terms as President of La Comunidad of Hispanic Scholars of Religion at the American Academy of Religion and is the co-editor of The Columbia University Press Series in Religion and Politics. Dr. Espinosa is the author/editor of nine books, including Latino Pentecostals in America: Faith and Politics in Action (Harvard), Religion, Race, and Barack Obama’s New Democratic Pluralism (Routledge), Religion, Race, and the American Presidency (Rowman & Littlefield), Religion and the American Presidency: George Washington to George W. Bush (Columbia), Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism and Culture (Duke), and U.S. Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States (Oxford). He is currently finishing Latino Religions and Politics in American Public Life and has started research on The Spiritual Impulse of the Civil Rights Movements. He teaches a number of classes (some funded by KLI) that deal with leadership, including Visionaries, Prophets and Transformational Leadership, Religion, Race and the Civil Rights Movement, Religion and the American Presidency, American Religious History, U.S. Latino Religions and Politics, Religion and American Politics, Mystics, Prophets and Social Change, Religion, Politics & Global Violence, and Religion & Film.