Bryan M. Ellrod

Director, Pre-Law
Academic Counselor

Office: Reynolda Hall 125
Phone: (336) 758-4734
Email: ellrodb@wfu.edu

Bryan M. Ellrod joined Wake Forest in 2022 as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program for Leadership & Character. Since 2023, he has served as the University’s Director of Pre-Law. Working in this capacity, Dr. Ellrod endeavors to develop courses, advising, and co-curricular programming that would cultivate the excellences of character and mind necessary to equip students for their pursuits in the justice-seeking professions and to infuse their work with the ideal of pro humanitate.

Dr. Ellrod completed his Ph.D. in the Ethics & Society course of study at Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion. His research explores questions of membership, identity, and responsibility at the intersections of religion, ethics, law, and politics. His current book project, Can These Bones Live: A Political Theology for the US-Mexico Borderlands, takes up these questions in light of the US border enforcement regime known as “Prevention Through Deterrence.” 

Dr. Ellrod has also published on ethical pedagogy, on ethics and aesthetics, and he is currently working on two pieces interrogating the utopian motivations behind artificial intelligence’s application to the field of Law.

In his free time, Dr. Ellrod is an avid (if untalented) ice hockey player and enjoys cooking and hiking with his wife, Courtney, and their border collie, Ekko.