Carlos Ruiz Martinez is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa. He is broadly interested religion in U.S. public life, immigration and religion, and race and Catholicism in the Americas. His dissertation is a study of how religion and immigration enforcement have intersected in the United States, from the 1980s sanctuary movement to the development of a network of Catholic migrant shelters in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. His research combines historical and ethnographic research methods. 

Research interests

• Race and Catholicism
• Theory and method in the study of religion
• Religion in public life
• Religion and migration
• Borderlands history
• Sanctuary

Selected publications

“The Question of Sanctuary: The Adorers of the Blood of Christ and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement, 1983-1996.” U.S. Catholic Historian 38, no. 4 (2020): 53-70