Education

• Ph.D., Religious Studies, University of Toronto, 1995

Bio

Russell T. McCutcheon, who came to the University of Alabama’s Department of Religious Studies as its Department Chair in the summer of 2001, was trained at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario) and the University of Toronto, where he received his PhD in the academic study of religion in 1995. He came to the U.S. from Canada in 1993, to teach full time as an Instructor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1993-96); from 1996 to 2001 he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at Southwest Missouri State University (Springfield; now known as Missouri State University). Since 2005 he has held the rank of Professor and, in February 2018, was awarded the rank of University Research Professor from the University of Alabama’s Board of Trustees. In 2019 he became a U.S. citizen, holding dual U.S./Canadian citizenship.

In December 2023 Prof. McCutcheon was awarded an honorary life membership in the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR)–an honor extended by the field’s only international scholarly society to just 22 scholars worldwide.

He served as department chair here at UA from 2001-09, leading a complete reinvention of the unit, then led technology projects for the College of Arts & Sciences for two years, returning to REL full-time in 2011. In August of 2013 Prof. McCutcheon was reappointed by the Dean to the role of department chair; in 2018 he was appointed to his fourth 5 year term, stepping down in August 2023 after serving a total of 18 years in the role, during a time when the unit tripled in faculty size and became a leading program in the country in both research productivity, digital skills, and degree innovation.

His areas of interest include the history of scholarship on myths and rituals, the history of the publicly-funded academic study of religion as practiced in the U.S., secularism, theories of religion, as well as the relations between the classification “religion” itself and the rise of the nation-state.

He has written a wide number of books, including his first, Manufacturing Religion (1997) and Studying Religion: An Introduction (2007; second ed. 2018, third ed. 2024), as well as publishing a several collections of his own essays, such as Critics Not Caretakers (2001; second ed. 2024), The Discipline of Religion (2003), A Modest Proposal on Method (2015) and Entanglements (2015) — while also editing journals and editing or co-editing a variety of resources in the field (such as The Guide to the Study of Religion [with Willi Braun, 2000], Fabricating Origins [2015], Fabricating Identities [2017], and Religion in 5 Minutes [with Aaron Hughes, 2017]). In 2018 he published two new collections of his own essays: “Religion” in Theory and Practice (Equinox) and Fabricating Religion (Walter de Gruyter) as well as another co-edited book with Braun, Reading J. Z. Smith (Oxford University Press).

His recent books include an edited collection of Willi Braun’s essays, Jesus and Addiction to Origins (Equinox 2020), Remembering J. Z. Smith (a collection of essays on the influence of Jonathan Z. Smith, co-edited with Emily Crews; Equinox 2020), and, with Aaron Hughes, a collection of leading scholars debating each other’s definitions of religion (for Oxford University Press; Fall 2021). His collection of essays, On Making a Shift in the Study of Religion and Other Essays was published in Berlin by Walter de Gruyter in 2021 and, along with Aaron Hughes, he co-authored two new resources, Religion in 50 Words: A Critical Vocabulary and Religion in 50 More Words: A Redescriptive Vocabulary (2021). With Aaron Hughes he is also the editor of What is Religion? Debating the Academic Study of Religion (2021). Among his latest publications is an edited volume on teaching as well as an edited volume on the future of doctoral training in the study of religion. Forthcoming among his works is an edited volume on revising doctoral training in the study of religion as well as a collection of dialogues on religion and its study. Currently, he is working on a new edition of his 2005 book, Religion and the Domestication of Dissent.

He was the series editor for Religion in Culture and Critical Categories in the Study of Religion (both with Routledge), an earlier series now published by Bloomsbury (Controversies in the Study of Religion), as well as currently being one of the co-editors of the Supplements to MTSR book series (published by Brill).

Learn More

See his A Good Book episode.

Courses Taught

McCutcheon’s undergraduate teaching regularly includes large enrollment sections of REL 100 Introduction to the Study of Religion as well as a wide variety of seminars in the Department (on such topics as theories of religion and the rhetoric of religious experience). In addition, he is a member of UA’s Graduate Faculty and regularly supervises and teaches M.A. students.

Lectures

Watch a 2011 public lecture that Prof. McCutcheon delivered — “Religion Before ‘Religion’, or the Persistence of Imagining Religion” — at Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany.

Watch a 2015 talk that Prof. McCutcheon gave, on undergraduate teaching, at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Watch a short 2016 presentation that Prof. McCutcheon delivered at the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion on the theme of that year’s meeting.

Selected Publications

Visit Prof. McCutcheon’s amazon.com author’s page to learn more about his work or find him on Google Scholar. You can also find samples of his past and current work on his author’s page at ether Academia.edu or ReaearchGate.