Bio
Bryan Ellrod is the Director of Pre-Law in the Office of Academic Advising. He earned his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion, as well as an M.Div. and Th.M. from the Candler School of Theology. He holds a B.A. degree with dual majors in Religion and Philosophy from Florida Southern College. As Director of Pre-Law, Bryan conducts individual advising and coordinates pre-professional programming that facilitates students’ vocational discernment and emerging sense of purpose. In his faculty appointment in Interdisciplinary Humanities, he teaches courses in legal humanities that emphasize the character virtues necessary for good legal advocacy. Bryan’s research explores questions of membership, identity, and responsibility at the intersections of politics, law, and religion. His forthcoming book develops the ethical and political implications of becoming “neighbors” to those who have lost their lives crossing through the US-Mexico borderlands, arguing for the adoption of an ethical subjectivity constituted by the demand of the excluded other and a politics of responsibility for the lives that projects of national self-determination cast aside. Throughout this study, Bryan interrogates the law of migration and its function in forming national identities and constructing the ethical relationships between insiders and outsiders, members and non-members, “citizens” and “aliens.” Bryan has also published on law and artificial intelligence, ethics pedagogy, and the intersections of ethics and aesthetics. (The salary for this position was taken on by Wake Forest University in November 2023.)