Whittney Barth as New CSLR Executive Director |

Whittney Barth as New CSLR Executive Director

The Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University is delighted to announce the appointment of Whittney Barth as Executive Director, effective August 1, 2022. In her new role, Barth will manage CSLR daily operations; recruit and lead staff, post-doctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and student fellows; create and support CSLR-sponsored research projects and programs; build new alliances with other interdisciplinary units on campus; and organize events consistent with the Center’s mission, including celebration of the Center’s fortieth anniversary in the 2022-23 academic year. Barth will also serve as the inaugural Charlotte McDaniel Scholar.

CSLR Director and Woodruff Professor, John Witte, Jr. calls Whittney’s appointment “transformational.” “Whittney brings to the job a brilliant mind, rich academic experience, a learned pen, a generous heart, superb organizational strengths, and the refined legal skills needed to navigate bureaucratic complexities.” Barth will work with Witte and a small governing board to strategize for the Center’s future and then play a leading role in implementing that vision.

Barth joins CSLR after nearly three years as a litigator with a nationally-recognized plaintiffs’ firm Sanford Heisler Sharp where she worked primarily on employment discrimination matters. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and was Executive Comments Editor of the Chicago Journal of International Law. Barth served as a teaching assistant for two undergraduate courses in the University of Chicago’s Laws, Letters, and Society Program and completed internships with several national advocacy organizations.

Prior to law school, Barth served for nearly five years as the Assistant Director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. She received her Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School and her Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude from Miami University, where she earned a double major in Comparative Religion and American Studies and a minor in Political Science. While at Miami, Barth received the President’s Distinguished Service Award and the Provost Student Academic Achievement Award and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

Her research interests include, among other topics, the place and impact of religion in American legal history, the development of the ministerial exception within U.S. employment law, and the role of religious actors in the development of international human rights law. She has authored and co-authored pieces that appear in the Chicago Journal of International Law, the University of Illinois Law Review Online, Law360, and Bloomberg Law. She has co-written book chapters in volumes published by Oxford University and Georgetown University presses.