Donna Freitas

Freitas lectures at universities across the United States on her work about college students. Over the years, she has written for national newspapers and magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post. She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Catholic University, and she’s currently a non-resident research associate at the Center for Religion and Society at Notre Dame. Freitas has been a professor at Boston University in the Department of Religion and also at Hofstra University in their Honors College. She has written children’s novels for Scholastic, Harper Collins, and FSG.

In 2008, Freitas published Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance and Religion on America’s College Campuses with Oxford University Press, based on her national study about how sex and faith coincide (and collide) in the lives of college students. Currently, she is at the tail end of collecting research for a new study about social media and how it is effecting the ways we construct identity and sense of self, how we make meaning in the world, and navigate our relationships. In 2014, Freitas conducted nearly 200 in-person interviews with college students at thirteen different colleges and universities about these subjects.