DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Faculty Research Areas

James S. Bielo

• Ethnography
• Material Religion
• US Evangelicalism
• Global Christianity
• Anthropology of Religion

Kevin Buckelew

• Chinese Buddhism
• Chan/Zen Buddhism
• Chinese Buddhist apocryphal scriptures
• Interactions between Buddhism and Daoism
• Gender, sexuality, and the body

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

• Religion and State
• Religion, Law & Politics
• Political Theory/Political Theology
• Public Understandings of Religion
• Religion and International Relations
• American Borders
• US Religion, Politics & Public Life

Brannon Ingram

• Islam in South Asia
• Islam in South Africa
• Sufism
• Islamic Law
• Traditionally educated Muslim religious scholars (ulama)
• The Deoband movement

Sarah Jacoby

• Tibetan Buddhist Studies
• Buddhist literature
• Gender and sexuality studies
• Auto/biography studies

Mark McClish

• Religion in classical South Asia
• Hindu law (dharmaśāstra) and Statecraft (arthaśāstra)
• Sanskrit language and literature
• Textual criticism
• Law and religion
• Politics and religion

KB Dennis Meade

• Africana Religion
• African Diaspora Studies
• Religion and Ethnography
• Global Pentecostalism
• Religion and Politics
• Caribbean Studies
• Digital Humanities 

Michelle Molina

• History of Christianity in early modern Europe and Latin America, with emphasis on the Society of Jesus and colonial Mexico
• Early modern natural and moral philosophy
• Interested in the space where critical theory meets social science

Robert Orsi

• American Catholicism in both historical and ethnographic perspective
• Theory and method for the study of religion

Sarah McFarland Taylor

• Media, Religion, and Culture
• Religion in the Digital Age
• Religion, Environment, and Climate Change
• Climate Mediamaking
• Religion, Marketing, and Consumerism
• Religion and American Culture
• Environmental Humanities
• Hope Studies

Barry Wimpfheimer

• Classical Rabbinic Literature
• Babylonian Talmud
• The relationship between law and literature as both a general theoretical question and within the Jewish tradition 

Shira E. Schwartz

• Rabbinic Judaism, especially rabbinic education and embodiment in late antiquity and contemporary Jewish institutional afterlives
• American Judaism
• Jewish Orthodoxy and ex-Orthodoxy (Off the Derech Studies)
• Comparative Ex-Religion
• Feminist Science Studies
• Bioethnography; Textual Ethnography
• Gender/Sex, Sexuality, and Reproduction