NEH Seminar 2009 Participants

Alan Wolfe
Director, Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life
Professor of Political Studies
Boston College

Alan Wolfe is the founding director of the Boisi Center and Professor of Political Science at Boston College. He is author of more than a dozen books, including, most recently, The Future of Liberalism (2009), Does American Democracy Still Work? (2006), Return to Greatness (2005), The Transformation of American Religion: How We actually Practice our Faith (2003), Moral Freedom (2001) and One Nation After All (1999). Widely considered one of the nation's most prominent public intellectuals, he is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic and The Atlantic, and has delivered lectures across the United States and Europe. (more...)

Daniel DiSalvo
Assistant Professor of Political Science
The City College of New York – CUNY

Daniel DiSalvo received his doctorate in politics from the University of Virginia and was previously Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor at Amherst College.  His scholarly work focuses on political parties, elections, public policy and American political thought.  He has written on these topics for a variety of publications, including The Tocqueville Review, The Public Interest, Society, Commentary, The Forum, French Politics, Culture and Society and The Journal of Politics.

Paul Djupe
Associate Professor of Political Science
Denison University
Granville, Ohio

Paul Djupe is an associate professor of political science at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and holds a PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. He regularly teaches courses in American politics, specializing in American public opinion and political behavior, with particular interests in the political influence of religion and the nature of social influence. Uniting these two elements is a concern for the role of organizations in packaging social interaction and mandating exposure to information. He is the coauthor of The Political Influence of Church (Cambridge: 2009), Religious Interests in Community Conflict: Beyond the Culture Wars (Baylor: 2007), The Prophetic Pulpit: Clergy, Churches, and Communities in American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield: 2003), and Religious Institutions and Minor Parties in the United States (Praeger: 1999), as well as articles on religion and politics appearing in such journals as American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Political Research Quarterly, Politics and Religion, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Evelyn Early
Air University Senior State Department Advisor
Montgomery, Alabama

Evelyn A. Early served as Counselor for Press and Cultural Affairs at the American Embassy in Rabat before joining Air University in September 2008. Her AU portfolio includes teaching and advising on interagency curriculum.

A diplomat by profession, she was formerly an anthropologist and has conducted research in Lebanon on Shi'a voluntary associations; in Egypt -- with support of Fulbright pre-doctoral, NIMH and SSRC grants -- on popular Islam and medical anthropology amongst traditional urban women; and in Syria -- with support of a Fulbright Islamic Civilization grant -- on popular culture. In addition to her study Baladi Women of Cairo: Playing with an Egg and a Stone and her co-edited book with Donna Lee Bowen, Everyday Life in the Muslim Middle East, she has published such articles as "Syrian Television Drama: Permitted Political Discourse," "Darid Laham:  A Modern Syrian Political Satirist in the Tradition of Goha," "Fertility and Fate," "Getting It Together:  Business Narratives of Baladi Women of Cairo, Egypt," and "Trilateral Touchstones: Personal and Cultural Space." 

She received her masters in Middle East Studies at the American University of Beirut and her doctorate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She has taught at the Universities of New Mexico, Notre Dame, and Houston. She has served as a consultant to USAID and other institutions in the fields of medical anthropology and women in development. Dr. Early joined the diplomatic service in the eighties and before her recent assignments in Rabat and Air University, worked as the Director of the American Cultural Center in Khartoum, Sudan, the press attaché for the American Embassy in Rabat, the Country Affairs Officer for North Africa in USIA in Washington, the Director of the American Cultural Center in Damascus, and the Counselor for Press and Cultural affairs at the American Embassy in Prague. She received her Master's in Strategic Studies from the War College at Ft. McNair in 2005.

Maureen Fitzgerald
Associate Professor, Religious Studies and American Studies
Director of the American Studies Program
The College of William and Mary

Maureen Fitzgerald has an MA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in American History, with special emphasis on women, religion, and immigration history. She authored an introduction to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible (Northeastern University Press, 1993) and is author of the forthcoming Habits of Compassion: Irish-Catholic Nuns and the Origins of the Welfare System (University of Illinois Press). She teaches graduate courses on American religious history, with special emphasis on immigration, race and religious radicalism. She also teaches courses on African-American Religion, Immigration and Religion, the two-semester survey of American religious history and freshman seminars on women and religion in America, and God and the Protest Novel. She is currently researching and writing on the historical process of secularization in 20th century America, with emphasis on the body, work and the transformation of categories of soul and self.

Beverly Gaddy
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg

Beverly Gaddy completed her doctorate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1998 with a dissertation on religion and political tolerance in the United States.  She teaches courses in American politics, religion and politics, and political theory.  Her scholarship is on religion and politics and U.S. democracy, with publications on the politics of Presbyterian clergy, U.S. election reform, and political tolerance.  Current scholarship focuses on the political thought of Søren Kierkegaard.

Amit Gupta
Associate Professor in the Department of International Security Studies
USAF Air War College
Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Amit Gupta research has focused on South Asian and Australian security issues. He also works on the globalization of sports.

Matthew Hedstrom
Assistant Professor of History and American Studies
Roger Williams University
Bristol, Rhode Island

In the fall 2009, Matt Hedstrom will begin his new position as Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.  He previously held positions as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University (2007-2008) and as a Lilly Fellow and Lecturer in Humanities and American Studies at Valparaiso University (2005-2007).  His PhD is in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.  His book, Seeking a Spiritual Center:  Books, Book Culture, and Liberal Religion in Modern America, is due out with Oxford University Press in 2010.  Matt teach courses in American Studies, US History, and American religion, including courses on the history, culture, politics, and meaning of religious diversity in the United States.  He is currently beginning a new research project on race and the search for religious authenticity since the Civil War.

Elizabeth Hodge
Professor and Chair of Philosophy Department
Gavilan College
Gilroy, California

As the chair of a small philosophy department, Elizabeth Hodge teaches a broad range of courses from an introductory survey course, to comparative religions, to critical thinking and logic.  Her area of speciality is ethics, particularly the development moral knowledge (moral epistemology), as well as the development of moral agents, decision-making, and agents for social change.  More recently, her research has focused on education and social justice, as the role of philosophy within anime’ and graphic novels. 

She currently has a work in progress is called, "The Janus Effect: Institutionalizing misguided 'multi-culturalism'" curriculum serves to perpetuate of social inequities and exacerbate identity confusion. Merely changing vocabulary masks bias and facilitates its continued development.  Within the Janus Effect, the interplay between different cultures serves as a façade of celebration which silences and confounds individuals. 

Her research typically involves a duality of belief, as often contradictory applications dependent on context.  One way of expressing this is to become aware of “necessary inconsistency” of beliefs often generated by particular, salient characteristics of social context as they affect the individual’s sense of self and safety. 

Hodge is active in grass-roots campaigns looking to overturn Prop. 8 in California, which denied gay marriage.  Additionally, she is actively lobbying to change community college funding from being included in the K-12 funding – making community college grades 13/14 and sweeping in provisions of NCLB into the community college arena.

Julie Ingersoll
Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Department of Philosophy
University of North Florida

Julie Ingersoll has PhD in Religious Studies from University of California at Santa Barbara and teaches and writes about Religion in American Culture.  She has publishedtwo books: Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles (New York University Press, 2003) and Baptist and Methodist Faiths in America (New York: Facts on File, 2003).  Her current project is a book on the Christian Reconstruction movement and its impact on American culture and politics.

In addition to the books noted above, she has also published essays on religion and politics, gender, religion in popular culture and nearly every dimension of American fundamentalism and evangelicalism—from Christian schooling and homeschooling, church and state issues such as vouchers and tax credits, the rise of the religious right and gender and family issues.

She teaches courses that directly connect with the interests and goals of this seminar:  Religion in America (where she deals with the changes in religion over time as well as secularization theory); Religion and Politics and Religion and Violence (where they engage issues of pluralism, tolerance and the limits of both); Religion and the Courts (where they deal with First Amendment Jurisprudence and the paradox of establishment in the effort to preserve free exercise); Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (addressing fundamental incompatibilities between conservative religion and liberal democracy); and Religion and Popular Culture (where they deal with the mutual shaping of both and the variety of ways that seemingly secular parts of culture can function in ways that are decidedly religious.)

Benjamin Johnson
Assistant Professor of English
University of Central Missouri

Ben Johnson specializes in American Modernist Poetry.  He received his PhD from Rutgers University.  He has published articles on Henry James, Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens in venues such as Arizona Quarterly and the Wallace Stevens Journal.  In his current project, he argues that key moments in the evolution of Moore's poetic career are tied closely to her engagement with mainline Protestantism.

Robert Lacey
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Iona College

Robert Lacey received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 2006.  He teaches courses in political theory and American government.  His research interests lie primarily in democratic theory and American political thought, but he is also interested more generally in American political and intellectual history. He is the author of American Pragmatism and Democratic Faith (Northern Illinois University Press, 2008).

Kurt Piehler
Associate Professor of History
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

G. Kurt Piehler is author of Remembering War the American Way (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995, reprint ed., 2004) and World War II in the American Soldiers’ Lives Series (Greenwood Press, 2007). Piehler also co-edited The Atomic Bomb and American Society  (University of Tennessee Press, 2009) and Major Problems in American Military History (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). He served as associate editor of Americans at War: Society, Culture, and the Home Front (Macmillan Reference/Gale, 2005) and consulting editor of Oxford Companion to American Military History (1999). Piehler is book series editor for World War II: The Global, Human, Ethical Dimension published by Fordham University Press.

As founding director (1994-1998) of the Rutgers Oral History Archives of World War II, he conducted over 200 interviews with veterans of World War II.  Many of these interviews conducted by Piehler can found on the internet at www.oralhistory.rutgers.edu. His televised lecture, “The War That Transformed a Generation”, which drew on the Rutgers Oral History Archives, appeared on the History Channel in 1997.

Christopher Shannon
Associate Professor of History
Christendom College
Front Royal, Virginia

Christopher Shannon is a cultural historian whose scholarly work has focused on the rise of social science as the language of public reason in twentieth-century America.  His first two books, Conspicuous Criticism (1996) and A World Made Safe for Differences (2001), examine the rise of the anthropological notion of culture as a secular substitute for a pre-modern, Catholic notion of tradition.  In these works, he draws on the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre to argue that cultural consciousness, initially invoked as a healing antidote to the acids of nineteenth-century market capitalism, ultimately served only to further undermine community by extending instrumental social relations into the most intimate aspects of private life. 
His current research project addresses the meaning of the liberal commitment to “diversity” in light of the failure of “culture” to transcend classical liberal individualism.   This project, “The Challenge of Guadalupe: Catholic Traditionalism and Liberal Political Culture,” will address the intersection of faith and ethnicity in American political life through an examination of the Catholic symbolism of contemporary Mexican-American identity politics.  Despite the wide range of meanings attached to Our Lady of Guadalupe, she remains a symbol rooted in a deeply traditional, pre-modern Catholic culture in many ways at odds with the fundamental principles of modern liberal politics.  Liberal claims to embrace cultural diversity have so far proved unable to accommodate cultures that do not accept individual freedom as the highest value.  Is “diversity within the limits of individualism,” so to speak, true diversity?  If not, what is real diversity and what are the limits of diversity within our current political system?

Emmanuel Twesigye
Aden S. and Mollie Wollam Benedicts Professor of Christian Studies
Department of Religion
Ohio Wesleyan University

Emmanual Twesigye's teaching specialty is church history, theology and Christian ethics.

William Young
Assistant Professor of Humanities
Endicott College

William Young received his BA degree in English Literature with a minor in Religion from Swarthmore College, a MS and PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia. He began his career in teaching, as a teaching assistant at the University of Virginia and then later became an instructor within Interdisciplinary Studies Program. He has taught at James Madison University within the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Loyola College in the Department of Theology and King's College in the Department of Theology. His research interests are interdisciplinary, covering the fields of philosophy, contemporary culture, religious thought, philosophy of language and systematic theology and issues of diversity and multiculturalism. His work with the Society for Scriptural Reasoning involved interaction with Jewish and Muslim scholars, as well as Christians examining comparative hermeneutics. Currently, he is working on a project on interreligious friendships, and their impact on modern religious thought, and plans to do further work on restorative justice and systems of punishment.

Young has long been committed to fostering positive dialogues - across cultures, between faiths, beyond political affiliations and academic disciplines. His personal and professional passions lie in supporting interreligious friendships and exploring the underpinnings of punishment and forgiveness. Through Endicott's recent Political Awareness Fund initiative, he brought speakers, filmmakers, and programs to campus that explored many sides of complicated issues like the Iraq War, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and the 2008 election. Dr. Young's penchant for drawing from many voices and multiple disciplines brings depth and new perspectives to the courses he teaches in philosophy, ethics, and comparative religion. He has a new book called Uncommon Friendships: Interreligious Friendship and Modern Religious Thought coming out fall 2009.