His research focuses on Black Catholics, racial justice, and racism in the U.S. Catholic Church. He is the author of Authentically Black and Truly Catholic: The Rise of Black Catholicism in the Great Migration (NYU Press, 2017). Cressler is currently at work on an article manuscript titled “Categorizing Catholic Racism,” which analyzes white Catholic resistance to desegregation in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. He is also involved in a collaborative project tentatively titled “Catholicism, Colonialism, and Race in the Lands that Became the United States.” He received his M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School and his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Northwestern University.