Craig Prentiss is a Missouri native, a graduate of Bates College, and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago (1997), specializing in American religious history and the history of Christianity. Since arriving at Rockhurst (1995), he has held affiliated faculty positions with the American Studies program at the University of Bucharest in Romania as a Fulbright Fellow, UMKC’s interdisciplinary doctoral program in Religious Studies, and Franklin University in Lugano, Switzerland. Prentiss’s research focuses primarily on American religious history and the social impacts of classification and category formation. He authored "Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II" (NYU 2014), and is the editor of "Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction" (NYU 2003). He also published "Debating God’s Economy: Social Justice in America on the Eve of Vatican II" (Penn State University Press, 2008, paperback 2013), examining competing American Catholic conceptions of “economic justice” in the mid-20th century.

Prentiss regularly teaches “Religion: Community, Power, and Transcendence,” “Religion, Ethnicity and Race,” “Theories of Religion,” and “Religion in Latin America and the Caribbean” and "Religion and Colonialism." He has held research fellowships from the NEH and American Academy of Religion, a proud three-time recipient of Rockhurst’s Daniel L. Brenner Award for Outstanding Faculty Scholarship, and the student body selected "Faculty Member of the Year" in 2000.