Architectural rendering of new IUPUI Campus Center

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is a research and public outreach institute devoted to the promotion of the understanding of the relation between religion and other features of American culture. Established in 1989, the Center is based in the IU School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Now with forty research fellows, the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is considered the premier research institute in the nation working in American religious studies.

Center Programs, Activities, and Publications

Center activities include national conferences and symposia, books, essays, bibliographies and research projects, fellowships for young scholars, data-based communication about developments in the field of American religion, a newsletter devoted to the promotion of Center activities, and the semiannual scholarly periodical Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, which is among the highest-ranked academic journals in the nation.

Since its founding, the Center has influenced the field of American religious studies in multiple ways. On an academic level, it led the way in understanding religious pluralism with national conferences that “de-centered” religion. By placing Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and non-mainstream beliefs, behaviors, and rituals together in fashioning an analysis of American religion, the Center helped to increase scholarly and public understandings of the diversity of the American religious experience and established entirely new views from which to study religion in America.

As a public teaching venue, the Center for the Study of Religion and American culture has been unmatched by any other for nearly two decades. Journalists around the globe consistently turn to its officers for their insights about events in the United States. Print, radio, and television journalists interview the Center’s officers and research fellows hundreds of times annually. With seminars for young college, university, and seminary professors, the Center promotes better research and teaching about American religion by faculty. These sessions result in increased awareness and understanding of the diversity of American religious life and the manifold forms in which religion reveals itself in culture (and culture in religion) for thousands of students across the country.

Introducing the Young Scholars in American Religion 2009-2011

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is pleased to announce that the following individuals have been selected to participate in the Young Scholars in American Religion Program 2009-2011:

Dr. Fay Botham, American Indian & Native Studies Program, Department of American Studies, University of Iowa; Dr. Heather D. Curtis, Department of Religion, Tufts University; Dr. Jonathan Ebel, Department of Religion, University of Illinois, Urbana; Dr. Maura Jane Farrelly, Department of American Studies, Brandeis University; Dr. Jennifer Graber, Department of Religious Studies, College of Wooster; Dr. Matthew J. Grow, Department of History, University of Southern Indiana; Dr. Everett Hamner, Department of English & Journalism, Western Illinois University; Dr. Kip Kosek, American Studies Department, George Washington University; Dr. Lynn S. Neal, Department of Religion, Wake Forest University; and Dr. Jonathan Walton, Department of Religious Studies, University of California, Riverside.

Please join the Center in congratulating these outstanding scholars, whose seminars will be led by Dr. Tracy Fessenden of Arizona State University and Dr. Clark Gilpin of the University of Chicago Divinity School.  

Jan Shipps receives Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship

Jan Shipps, Professor Emerita at IUPUI, has been awarded an Emeritus Fellowship from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“Emeritus Fellowships are intended to support the scholarly activities of outstanding faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who, at the time of taking up the fellowships, will be officially retired but continue to be active and productive in their fields. In addition, the program provides institutions with resources to defray incremental costs associated with the fellows,” said the announcement from Mellon.

Shipps, Professor Emerita of History and Religious Studies and currently a Research Fellow in the Center, is a renowned Mormon scholar. She is the author of Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons, and Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition.

“This fellowship will be indispensable to my work because it will permit me to complete much-needed on-site research that will allow me to finish a book I have been working on for nearly a decade. The working title of the book is Being Mormon: The Latter-day Saints since World War II,” said Shipps.

CSRAC named Signature Center

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture is pleased to announce that it has been named a Signature Center of IUPUI. The Signature Center designation, new to IUPUI, is based upon several criteria, including research strength, academic distinction, and scholarly record of faculty investigators.