Jennifer Rycenga is Professor of Comparative Religious Studies at San José State University. Her areas of interest include American religious history, religion and music, feminist analyses of religion, lesbian history, religion and politics, and feminist analyses of music. Her co-edited volume of the writings of feminist Mary Daly, The Mary Daly Reader, with Linda Barufaldi, was published in December 2016 by New York University Press. She has published numerous articles, and co-edited the volumes Frontline Feminisms with Marguerite Waller (Routledge, 2000), and Queering the Popular Pitch with Sheila Whiteley (Routledge, 2006). She is currently finishing a cultural biography of white Abolitionist educator Prudence Crandall (1803-1890) and her Black students.  

She received the Ph.D. in the area of Religion and Music from the Graduate Theological Union and the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. She has been teaching at SJSU since 1995.

Prof. Rycenga is an avid birder, with a North American Life List of 716 species, and over 1450 species worldwide. Ask her about your backyard visitors and encounters with birds that go bump in the night! She serves as president of the Sequoia Audubon Society in San Mateo county, where she is an avid advocate for Citizen-Science projects.