Savannah Finver is a doctoral student in Comparative Studies with an emphasis on religious studies, especially looking at questions related to religion, politics, and law in the United States. Working primarily through discourse analysis, she examines how the category of religion is made manifest in and through U.S. legal discourse in the form of legislation and court documents, as well as how these legal documents and decisions are contested and expressed by organizations and practitioners. Relying on scholarship emerging out of fields/disciplines such as religious studies, political science, history, cultural studies, and legal studies, Savannah aims to trace the context in which “religion” became a category in need of protection in the U.S., how this protection became encoded in U.S. law, and the ways in which it manifests (and the socio-political implications thereof) in various ways across different groups and subjects.