Originally established in 1996 as the Center for the Study of Religious Freedom, the Robert Nusbaum Center at Virginia Wesleyan University encourages diversity, dialogue, and religious freedom and supports education and civil dialogue on issues related to race, religion, gender and gender identity, sexuality, and ethnicity. With its series Religious Freedom and Public Dialogue, the Nusbaum Center seeks to publish books that investigate historical and contemporary conceptualizations of religious freedom; books that interrogate the complex relationships between religion, race, and culture; and books that explore the impact that contested determinations of religious freedom have on public life.