Maura Jane Farrelly is a professor of American Studies and director of the Journalism
Program at Brandeis University. Farrelly has taught previously at Emory, the University
of Georgia and Fordham University. For several years, she worked as a full-time reporter,
first for Georgia Public Radio in Atlanta and then for the Voice of America in
Washington, D.C. and New York. She has also freelanced for NPR, PRI, and the BBC.
A historian by training, Farrelly is working on a book entitled Papist Patriots: The
Making of an American Catholic Identity. The book considers the factors that allowed
Catholics in British colonial America to develop a comfortable relationship with
individualism, republicanism, church-state separation, and religious pluralism.