Because of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture’s unique history and national reputation, it has gathered a permanent group of Faculty Research Fellows from various disciplines working in religion in America. These Fellows, all faculty members of Indiana University’s two research campuses, have a record of accomplishment beyond what any other university in North America can offer. Further, because central Indiana has several colleges, universities, and seminaries, the Center is home to a number of Associate Research Fellows as well. In all, nearly forty scholars participate in the work of the Center. These include:
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Indiana University Faculty Research Fellows |
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- Candy Gunther Brown (Ph.D., Harvard University) is associate professor of religious studies at IU-Bloomington. Awarded numerous research grants, she is author of The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880, a study of the evangelical publishing community that so influences American society today. Looking particularly at the history of religious publishing and spiritual h
ealing practices in America, she has authored over forty scholarly articles, capters, reviews, and papers, including one article that won the Sidney Mead Prize from the American Society of Church History. She is currently working on a book entitled Miracle Cures?: A Cultural History of Spiritual Healing in America.
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- David Craig (Ph.D. Princeton University) is associate professor of religious studies at IUPUI, specializing in religion, ethics, and politics. Author of John Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption and a score of articles, chapters, reviews, and papers, he researches and writes on social theories, philanthropy, and human meaning. His current book projects relate to the use of demonstrations as public ritual to affect social policy, and class-based problems faced by healthcare deliverers.
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- Edward E. Curtis IV (Ph.D., University of South Africa) is Millennium Scholar of the Liberal Arts and associate professor of religious studies at IUPUI, working in the areas of religion, race, and ethnicity; African American religions and history; and Islamic studies. The author of Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975 and Islam in Black America, he has authored more than sixty articles, chapters, reviews, and papers. He is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, a U.S. Department of State Middle East Partnership Initiative Grant, and an Andrew Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies. He is currently working on a documentary history of Islam in North America to be published by Columbia University Press.
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- Thomas J. Davis (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor and chair of religious studies at IUPUI. Working in the history of Christianity, he is the author of seven books and more than sixty articles, chapters, reviews, and papers. Recognized internationally for his work on the Reformed tradition, he is a member of the prestigious International Congress for Calvin Research. His creativity goes beyond academic writing, with two novels and another forthcoming. He is presently at work on a history of Christianity through twenty biographies of leaders in that tradition. Besides such prodigious scholarship, Davis has been for sixteen years the managing editor of the journal Religion and American Culture.
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- John Dichtl (Ph.D., Indiana University) is executive director of the National Council on Public History and adjunct professor of history at IUPUI. He is the author of Frontier Faiths: Transplanting Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic, a groundbreaking study of Catholic growth during the American frontier revivals. Since 1992 he has served in various capacities at the Organization of American Historians, including Deputy Director from 2000 to 2006. In addition, he worked for two years as an editor for the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. One of his most valued professional experiences was his participation in the Seminar for Historical Administration, a leadership development program sponsored by the American Association for State and Local History, American Association of Museums, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the Indiana Historical Society, the National Park Service, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
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- William Enright (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) is director of the Lake Family Institute on Faith and Giving at IUPUI. With a doctorate in church history that focused on the history of preaching, Enright spent nearly four decades as a Presbyterian minister. For twenty years he pastored Second Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, renown for its innovative programs. His current interests reside in understanding the relationship between faith and philanthropy in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions.
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- Arthur Farnsley II (Ph.D., Emory University) is adjunct faculty in religious studies and executive officer of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, which is housed in the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI. He is an independent researcher, writer, and consultant, with nearly forty articles, chapters, and papers, and six books, including Southern Baptist Politics, Rising Expectations: Urban Congregation, Welfare Reform, and Civic Life, and Sacred Circles, Public Squares: The Multicentering of American Religion. For several years he was research director of IUPUI’s Polis Center project on religion and urban culture, and remains an associate member of the I.U. graduate faculty and an adjunct professor of sociology and religious studies. A frequent contributor to Christian Century, he is currently working on a book about “redneck religion” in America.
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- Johnny Flynn (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara), lecturer in religious studies at IUPUI, is a leading scholar and teacher of Native American religions. With dozens of scholarly and popular articles on a variety of topics related to Indian religions, he currently directs the “Put Indians Back in Indiana” program for the university and advocates for Native Americans at the capitol.
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- Philip Goff (Ph.D., University of North Carolina), executive director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture and professor of religious studies and American studies, has published three books, including The Columbia Documentary History of Religion in America Since 1945 and Themes in Religion and American Culture. He is author of nearly ninety studies, book chapters, articles, reviews, and professional papers. For six years he has been the lead co-editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, as well as series editor for Greenwood Press’s acclaimed American Religious Experience. He is currently completing monographs on early religious radio and religion during the American founding era, as well as acting as lead author for a new textbook on American religious history for Cambridge University Press.
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- Richard Gunderman (Ph.D. and M.D., University of Chicago) is director of pediatric radiology, vice chairman of radiology, and associate professor of philosophy and philanthropy at IUPUI. With interests in medical ethics, philosophy of medicine, philanthropy, and medical humanities, he has published and spoken widely around the world, with three books and over two hundred articles and papers on subjects as varied as ethics in psychiatric research, health and fitness, and emotional intelligence. His most recent book is entitled Achieving Excellence in Medical Education. He is currently researching and writing about religious motivations for generosity in healthcare.
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- Paul Gutjahr (Ph.D., University of Iowa), associate professor of English and adjunct in religious studies and American studies at IU-Bloomington, is one of the nation’s leading scholars on the history of publishing in North America. His book An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-1880 is now the standard history on the topic. In addition, he has edited two important volumes, American Popular Literature in the Nineteenth Century and Illuminating Letters: Essays on Typography and Literary Interpretation. Interdisciplinary in his approach, he has written dozens of articles and papers on the history of the English Bible in North America.
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- Robert Helfenbein (Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) is assistant professor of teacher education and adjunct faculty in geography at IUPUI. His current research interests include critical geography, cultural studies of education, urban education and youth culture, and curriculum theory. His interest in the cultural aspects of education led him to include religious identity as a significant component to understanding student learning in numerous articles on curriculum theory.
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- Steven Ivy (Ph.D., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) currently serves as Senior Vice President for Values, Ethics, Social Responsibility, and Pastoral Services of Clarian Health Partners in Indianapolis. His leadership roles include developing the institution’s philosophy and practices related to values integration, sustaining both organizational ethics and clinical ethics programs, ensuring effective community service, and focusing chaplaincy, pastoral education, and pastoral counseling programs. He also teaches in the I.U. School of Medicine’s annual medical ethics elective focusing on “ethical theory and decision-making.” He serves on several committees for the IU schools of medicine and nursing. His teaching, as well as one book and over twenty articles, have focused on medical ethics, religion and medicine, crisis ministry, and pastoral perspectives on human development.
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- Sylvester Johnson (Ph.D., Union Theological Seminary), assistant professor of religious studies at IU-Bloomington, writes on religion and race in American history. His first book, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity, won the prestigious “Best First Book in the History of Religions” award from the American Academy of Religion. Among other projects, he is presently involved in documenting missionary efforts to African Americans throughout American history. Johnson is co-authoring the textbook in American religious history with Philip Goff and Rachel Wheeler.
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- Sheila Suess Kennedy (J.D., Indiana University) is associate professor of law and public policy in the highly decorated Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs as well as adjunct professor of political science at IUPUI. Formerly the executive director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, she has authored four books and nearly forty articles while writing a weekly column for the Indianapolis Star and speaking extensively. A member of the Indiana State Bar Association, she is among the foremost authorities of the relationships between religion and American public policy.
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- Marci Bounds Littlefield (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is assistant professor of sociology at IUPUI, working in race and ethnicity, urban development, and family in relation to religious institutions. She writes on the black church and economic development in the United States. Presently she is at work on a book titled Religious Institutions and New Ventures: Evidence from the African American Experience.
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- Edward T. Linenthal (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara) is professor of history and adjunct professor of religious studies at IU-Bloomington, as well as editor of The Journal of American History. Author of seven books, including Preserving Memory: the Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum and The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American Memory, he is among the nation’s leading authorities on public history and memory in America. His longtime interests in war and memory, especially as they present themselves in the processes of veneration, defilement, and redefinition in religious ways, has brought him recognition from the National Parks Service, for which he recently served as Visiting Scholar in NPS’s Civic Engagement and Public History program.
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- John McKivigan (Ph.D., Ohio State University) is Mary O’Brien Gibson Professor of History at IUPUI and editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers. Author and editor of five books and over forty articles, his research centers on American reform movements, ethnic history, and labor history. His book Slavery, Sectionalism, and American Religion is cited in most subsequent books on religiously-motivated social reform as one of the best studies of antebellum religion and the coming Civil War.
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- Eric Meslin (Ph.D., Georgetown University) is director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics, professor of medicine and of medical and molecular genetics in the Indiana University School of Medicine, and professor of philosophy in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. He is also assistant dean for bioethics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Formerly Executive Director of the U.S. National Bioethics Commission, charged by President Bill Clinton with advising the White House and the federal government on a range of bioethics issues (including cloning, stem cell research, international clinical trials, and genetics studies), he was also Program Director for Bioethics Research in the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Research Program at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. He has authored (or co-authored) more than 80 articles and book chapters, with most focusing on various topics in research ethics and health policy. He has been a consultant to the World Health Organization, the US Observer Mission to UNESCO, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and is a member of a number of advisory boards including the Board of Directors of the Canadian Stem Cell Network (of which he is also chair of the Ethics Committee).
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- James Perry (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is Chancellor’s Professor of public and environmental affairs and director of the Indiana University American Democracy Project. With more than a half-dozen books, including Civic Service: What Difference Does It Make? and Handbook for Public Administrators, along with scores of important articles to his credit, he is a national leader in thinking about public management and national and community service. His work on motivation for public service led him to direct a major study of religious motivations of volunteerism published last year.
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- Nancy Robertson (Ph.D., New York University), associate professor of history and director of women’s studies at IUPUI, works on religion and women’s associations in American history. Author of Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-1946, she has written nearly three dozen articles, reviews, and presentations ranging from race solidarity and Christian women to overviews of philanthropy in the United States.
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- Robert Robinson (Ph.D., Yale University) is Chancellor’s Professor and chair of sociology at IU-Bloomington. Author of dozens of groundbreaking articles in leading sociological journals, he employs comparative and historical methods to address a broad range of questions in social stratification, economic history, political sociology, and the sociology of religion. Recent articles address such topics as how belief in the American Dream shapes popular attitudes toward social justice, why trust in others is declining in the United States, how does the division between the religious traditionalists and modernists affects cultural and economic beliefs in the United States and Europe, how values that U.S. adults want to see fostered in children have changed over the last two decades, and what bolsters Americans’ sense of community. Robinson was the founding co-editor of the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, now in its twenty-third volume.
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- Jan Shipps (Ph.D., University of Colorado) is professor emeritus of religious studies at IUPUI and the current president of the American Society of Church History. Among the foremost scholarly authorities of Mormon history, she was the recent subject of several academic articles on her role as the leading non-Mormon interpreter of the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints. With four books and hundreds of articles, chapters, reviews, and papers to her credit, she is now working on a book about post-war Mormonism.
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- Brian Steensland (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Sociology at IU-Bloomington. His research interests include religion and politics in late 20th-century America, and federal and local anti-poverty initiatives. He is the author of The Failed Welfare Revolution: America's Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy and anumber of award-winning articles. His current research focuses on religion and views of the economy, and the politics of morality.
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- Stephen J. Stein (Ph.D., Yale University) is Chancellor’s Professor of Religious Studies, emeritus, at IU-Bloomington. Author of eleven books, nearly seventy articles and essays, and dozens of book reviews, his book The Shaker Experience in America won the prestigious “Philip Schaff Prize” of the American Society of Church History and stands as the exemplar of a social history of a religious movement. A former president of the American Society of Church History, he was also awarded the I.U. College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Faculty Award. His editorial experience includes more than twenty years as member of the editorial executive committee for The Works of Jonathan Edwards and co-editor of the “Religion in North America” series with Indiana University Press, as well as serving now as co-editor of the journal Religion and American Culture. He is currently the general editor of the three-volume Cambridge History of Religions in America.
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- Peter J. Thuesen (Ph.D., Princeton University), associate professor of religious studies and American studies at IUPUI and co-editor of the journal Religion and American Culture, is among the most distinguished young scholars working in American religious thought. Author of two books, including the Brewer Prize-winning In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles Over Translating the Bible, and over forty-five articles, book chapters, reviews, and presentations, he is presently at work on a book entitled Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine for Oxford University Press.
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- Rachel Waltz (MSN, RN, Hahnemann University) is clinical assistant professor in the department of family health in the School of Nursing at IUPUI. Her research on the health risks and benefits of religious women in the Catholic Church focuses heavily on the physical and emotional health of nuns caused by their beliefs and daily behaviors.
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- Rachel Wheeler (Ph.D., Yale University) is assistant professor of religious studies at IUPUI and associate editor of the journal Religion and American Culture. Author of the forthcoming book entitled To Live upon Hope: Missions and the Formation of Mahican Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast, as well as over thirty articles, essays, and papers, she has quickly established herself nationally as a leading expert on missions and religious synthesis. Her new project traces a Mahican Christian family from its pre-conversion days in 1740s Massachusetts to its annihilation in Indiana in 1815. Along with Goff and Johnson, she is co-authoring the new textbook on American religious history for Cambridge University Press.
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- Patricia Wittberg (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor of sociology at IUPUI, specializing in the study of religious institutions and organizations. Author of four books and dozens of articles and book chapters, she was a founding member of the Section on Religion in the American Sociological Association, as well as secretary of both the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association, for which she also served as editor of Review of Religious Research. Studying religion, formal organizations, urban society, and community and civil society, she is the author of The Rise and Fall of Catholic Orders, Emerging Religious Communities, and Creating a Future for Religious Life: A Sociological Perspective.
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Associate Research Fellows
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- Elizabeth Agnew (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Ball State University. Her areas of special interest include Religion in American Culture, Religion and Social Ethics, and Gender Issues in Religion and Ethics. Her research focuses on Protestant traditions and progressive social reform, and on religious and secular discourses about needs and rights. Her research on social reform and social work leader Mary Richmond appears in the edited collection Gender and the Social Gospel (Illinois, 2003) and in her book From Charity to Social Work: Mary Richmond and the Creation of an American Profession (Illinois, 2004).
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- Jonathan Baer (Ph.D., Yale University) is Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Religion at Wabash College. Teaching courses in African-American religion, health and religion, and Christian fiction, his research focuses on ideas of religious healing in American history. He has published articles in Church History and Journal of Religion. The winner of multiple research prizes, he is currently revising his dissertation for publication as a book.
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- Susan Curtis (Ph.D., University of Missouri) is professor of history and associate dean for Interdisciplinary Studies and Engagement in the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University, working in U.S. cultural history, American Studies, and the history of religion in America. Dr. Curtis has published three major works and dozens of chapters, articles, and reviews. Her book A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture demonstrated the interplay between sacred and secular realms in the reformulation of Protestant thought and practice between the 1880s and 1920s.
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- Vivian Deno (Ph.D., University of California, Irvine) is assistant professor of history at Butler University. Working on the intersection of race, gender, and class in early Pentecostalism, she has already published in the Journal of Women’s History and is writing about early Pentecostal missions in the American southwest, as well as representations of Charismatic Christians in popular film.
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- Darren Dochuk (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame) is assistant professor of American history at Purdue University, specializing in religious history. His recent dissertation, “From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Southernization of Southern California, 1935-1968,” won the prestigious Allen Nevins prize. Sponsored by the Society of American Historians, which is an affiliate of the American Historical Association, the Nevins Prize honors the best-written doctoral dissertation on a significant theme in American history.
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- William Mirola (Ph.D., Indiana University) is chair of history and social science and associate professor of sociology at Marian College. A longtime student of religion, social movement activism, labor history, and class divisions, he has published several articles on coalitions between religious groups and the American labor movement. In addition to church-labor issues, he has conducted large surveys of local opinion about the role congregations play in shaping civic life in Indianapolis. He is presently completing a book about Protestantism and the Eight-Hour Movement in nineteenth-century Chicago.
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- Donald Mitchell (Ph.D., University of Hawaii) is professor of philosophy at Purdue University working in comparative philosophy of religion and religious studies. He has authored or edited six books and numerous articles on Buddhism, Buddhism in America, and the Buddhist-Christian dialogue including Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience, and The Gethsemani Encounter, winner of the Frederick J. Streng Book of the Year Award. He is one of the founding members of the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies and associate editor of its journal. Since 1996, he has been involved in the Muslim-Christian dialogue in America; and in 2003, he established the Indiana Center for Cultural Exchange (ICCE), which he now directs. The ICCE is a partnership between Indiana University, Purdue University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Chicago, Georgetown University and the Columbia University that sponsors collaborative projects in, and exchanges with, the Muslim world.
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- William Ringenberg (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is professor and chair of history at Taylor University and past president (1988-90) of the Conference of Faith and History. Specializing in American religious history and the foundations of Christian thought, he has numerous works on the history of Protestant Higher Education including Taylor University: the First 150 Years (1996); Letters to Young Scholars: An Introduction to Christian Thought (2003); and The Christian College: A History of Protestant Higher Education in America (2006).
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- Scott Seay (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University) is assistant professor of church history at Christian Theological Seminary. Author of two books, Hanging Between Heaven and Earth: Capital Crime, Execution Preaching, and the Shape of New England Theology and The Election Preaching of the New Divinity Men, he has published over forty articles and reference entries about American religion. He is currently the managing editor of global and inclusive narrative history of the Stone-Campbell Movement, underwritten by the Disciples of Christ Historical Society.
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- Fenggang Yang (Ph.D., The Catholic University of America) is associate professor of sociology at Purdue University, working in the sociology of religion, particularly immigrant religions in the United States. He is the author of Chinese Christians in America and co-editor of Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries and State, Market and Religions in Chinese Societies. He has major articles in many sociological journals, one of which won the “Distinguished Article Award” for the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. His current research is on the political economy of religion in China and Chinese Christian churches in the United States.
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- Valarie Ziegler (Ph.D., Emory University) is professor of religious studies at Depauw University, specializing in religion in America and the history of Christianity. An award-winning teacher, she is also the author of three books: The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America, Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender, and Diva Julia: The Public Romance and Private Agony of Julia Ward Howe.
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