Lee Benzinger is a PhD student in the Sociology department. They graduated with a BA from Williams College in 2024, where they double majored in Anthropology and Religion. As an undergraduate, their Honors Thesis was an ethnographic and interview-based study focused on the relationship between gender and agency in a rural Fundamentalist church in a mining community. In 2025, they returned to their hometown of St. Louis and entered into the sociology PhD program here at Washington University. As a graduate student, they have joined a research project focused on the modern anti-vaccine movement and are working on designing a new qualitative research project aimed at better understanding the relationship between gender, religion, and conservative politics. Lee is passionate about understanding how people make complex, and even apparently contradictory decisions through qualitative research methods. When not doing research, they enjoy playing board games and spending time with their cats.
