Associate Professor, Religious Studies
Director, Center for Religion and the Human
Adjunct Faculty, Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Adjunct Faculty, Comparative Literature
Affiliated Faculty, Cultural Studies
Affiliated Faculty, Center for Research in Race and Ethnicity in Society
My research and teaching focus on religious, literary, and other cultural contexts of western modernity—especially in and around the United States. My first book, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU 2017), considers the religious and theological dimensions of the novelist Ralph Ellison’s concept of race, and I have published articles and book chapters on the literary homiletics of Zora Neale Hurston, the eschatology of “late” Bob Dylan albums, the “Great American Novel” as a theology of US exceptionalism, Nat Turner’s prophetic biblical irony, and the temporal hermeneutics of jazz. I am a co-author of the book The Abyss, or Life is Simple: Reading Knausgaard, Writing Religion (Chicago 2022) and am working on a new single-authored book about the boxer Muhammad Ali’s religious import. Future research will consider the Beats as an American religious movement and Harry Smith’s “old, weird America,” and I am developing an interest in the religio-racial elements of European musical romanticism in the 19th and early-20th centuries—including the work of Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. My writing has appeared in The Journal of Religion, Literature and Theology, Soundings, African American Review, The Journal of Africana Religions, and Religious Studies Review—as well as online with The Immanent Frame, Sightings, Jerry Jazz Musician, and Salo University—An Online Kurt Vonnegut Project.
My teaching draws from and extends these interests. I have taught graduate seminars in religion and literature and American religion, introductory undergraduate courses in both religion and sports and American religion, and undergraduate seminars on an array of topics, including “Muhammad Ali,” “Beat Religion,” “Irony in Religion and Literature,” “Zora Neale Hurston,” “Religion and Detective Fiction,” “The Old, Weird America,” and “Disaster in American Religion and Culture”—a course that considers how people deal creatively (through film, music, dance, and comics) with questions of theodicy in the wake of major representative disasters in US history (the sinking of the Titanic, the 1927 Mississippi flood, the eradication and removal of Native American people, and the events of September 11, 2001). My goal is for students to recognize religion not simply as a “thing” that people have, use, believe, or carry around, but instead as an inextricable dimension of human activity and cultural expression.
I am founding co-editor of the journal American Religion, published by IU Press, and serve on the editorial board of Literature and Theology, published by Oxford University Press. I serve on the steering committee of the Arts, Literature, and Religion section of the American Academy of Religion and sit on the executive committee of IU’s Center for Religion and the Human. In addition to the AAR, I remain active in the International Society for Religion, Literature, and Culture and the American Literature Association.
Contributors: Courtney Bender, Jeremy Biles, Liane Carlson, Joshua Dubler, Hannah C. Garvey, Erik Thorstensen, Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Cooper Harriss, Hannah Garvey
2022
“Time, Narrative, and All that Jazz: Ellison, Ricoeur, and Invisibility’s Hermeneutic Circle,” Literature and Theology 32: 4 (December 2018): 423-33.
“Preacherly Texts: Zora Neale Hurston and the Homiletics of Literature,” The Journal of Africana Religions 4:2 (2016): 278-90.
“One Blues Invisible: Civil Rights and Civil Religion in Ralph Ellison’s Second Novel,” African American Review 47: 2-3 (Summer/Fall 2014): 247-66.
The College of Arts