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Mentor Areas

I'm a scholar who develops theoretical and philosophical approaches to emotion, material culture, secularism, religion, and science.

Description:

I’m interested in how religion works, and especially why religion is such a powerful force in our lives (and equally why we sometimes say that it is, when it actually isn’t). To explore religion, I use a number of different academic disciplines, including affect theory, material culture studies, evolutionary biology, and queer theory. Applying affect theory to religion clarifies it as something we do with bodies, emotions, and objects in the world as much or more than with frameworks of beliefs. However, it would be wrong to imagine that religion alone is determined by emotion. Atheism, science, and secular material culture can also be studied using these lenses.

In my current research I’m exploring the following:

*Affective approaches to material culture. I'm particularly interested in how we can use affect theory, decolonial theory, and material culture studies to better understand how Confederate monuments achieve certain political effects, and how we can bring voices that have been excluded from the conversation into contemporary debates.

*Affective approaches to architecture, especially Victorian Gothic architecture of the 19th century.

*Affective approaches to secularism, atheism, science, and the history of the university.

Preferred Qualifications

None but students are encouraged to take either RELS 011: Science and Religion or RELS 102/ANTH 112/ARTH 339: Sacred Stuff.

Details:

Preferred Student Year

First-year, Second-Year, Junior, Senior

Project Academic Year

2023–2024

Volunteer

Yes

Paid

No

Yes indicates that faculty are open to paying students they engage in their research, regardless of their work-study eligibility.

Work Study

Yes

Yes indicates that faculty are open to hiring work-study-eligible students.

Researcher


Assistant Professor of Religious Studies