Study Religion Ep. 10: Making the Jump Part 1 w/ Tenzan Eaghll

The Study Religion podcast is back! This is the first of three episodes that feature interview with people who decided to take a risk and make a jump in their careers. They found new ways to use their training in religious studies and made their own path. In this episode we talk with Tenzan Eaghll who teaches at Mahidol University in Thailand. Hear how he made the jump and landed halfway around the world.   […]

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“Working Yourself into a Shoot”: When is a Performance a Performance?

As some of you may know, I love pro wrestling and I think it can be good data for the scholar of religion. Let me offer a recent example that lit up the wrestling fan twitters over the weekend. The WWE, the world’s biggest wrestling company, toured through Canada over the weekend, holding a show in Edmonton, Alberta. While driving through Canada, one of the wrestlers, Lacey Evans, was pulled over for speeding. She posted this video on Twitter Saturday. 1.Canada […]

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American Examples 2020: Call for Participants

American Examples is a collaborative working group for early career scholars who study religion in America, broadly conceived, from a variety of disciplines. The program is generously funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. American Examples engages the study of religion in America across the three areas of research, teaching, and public scholarship. Drawing on expertise from across the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, American Examples’ training and mentoring produces scholars whose work exceeds the intellectual and geographic […]

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The Study Religion Podcast is Back!

It’s been a while but the Study Religion podcast is back! Go find us wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to subscribe, rate, and comment. In this episode we welcome Prof. Tim Jensen from the University of Southern Denmark, the president of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR). Prof. Jensen spent some time in conversation with our own Prof. Richard Newton and some of our MA students in Religion in Culture about how the academic […]

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A Religious Studies Guide to WrestleMania

On the first page of Imagining Religion, historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith writes: For the self-conscious student of religion, no datum possess intrinsic interest. It is of value only insofar as it can serve as exempli gratis of some fundamental issue in the imagination of religion. For Smith, and I agree with him, scholars should choose particular examples as data that suit particular questions that they want to answer. In this way, the scholar of religion is not bound by […]

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Time for Fall 2019 Registration Advising!

When we all get back from Spring Break on March 18 it will officially be time for registration advising for the Fall 2019 semester.  Prof. Altman has set aside Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons from noon-3:30 for advising appointments. So please email him and let him know a time and date that fits those afternoons so you can chat about the excellent courses we’re offering next semester and how to get you one semester closer to graduation! Also, check out […]

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Announcing the 2019 American Examples Participants

Earlier this fall we announced a new working group for early career scholars of religion in America, American Examples. Thanks to funding from REL and the College of Arts and Sciences we will be hosting 6 participants on campus for a workshop that will produce an anthology of new papers taking a new approach to the study of religion in America. We are happy and excited to announce the participants in the inaugural year of the working group: For more […]

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The CV: This is Your Life

Since Prof. McCutcheon has offered a couple of posts with advice about the job market, one on campus interviews and one on the process more broadly, I thought I would add a post about another piece of the job market process: the CV. The topic of the CV came up the other day in our REL 502: Public Humanities Foundations course when we were looking at professional websites the students had built. Every student had included some sort of CV […]

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Whose Evangelicalism is in Ruins?

The American Academy of Religion, the national scholarly association for religious studies in America, just sent out its program of plenary addresses for its upcoming annual meeting this November. The abstract for David Gushee’s Presidential Address caught my eye. There are a number of things to say about this. First of all, I told ya’ll this would happen during the nomination process three years ago. Looking closely at the abstract, the phrase “will perform ‘religion in public’ in a confessional vein” […]

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