Ronit Stahl is an historian of modern America. Her work focuses on pluralism in American society by examining how politics, law, and religion interact in spaces such as the military and medicine. Her book, Enlisting Faith: How the Military Chaplaincy Shaped Religion and State in Modern America(link is external) (Harvard University Press, 2017), traces the uneven processes through which the military struggled with, encouraged, and regulated religious pluralism over the twentieth century.
Her current research examines the rise of institutional and corporate rights of conscience in health care. This project weaves together the court decisions, legislation, medical and bioethical arguments, religious ideas, and lived experiences that shaped the disparate trajectories of reproductive healthcare, LGBT healthcare, and of end-of-life care from the 1970s to the present. In untangling how and why uneven patterns of rights for women, sexual minorities, people of color, immigrants, and people with disabilities emerged, she explores how religion has influenced health care as well as how law, politics, and culture have framed religious arguments about medicine. Although conventional accounts often frame conscience conflicts as religious versus secular, she focuses on the inter- and intra-religious debates that occur within institutions, policy, and public discourse.
