Center for Media, Religion and Culture

Scholars

Heidi Campell

See entry under Visitors to the Center

Lynn Schofield Clark

Associate Professor at the University of Denver and Director of the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media. She is the recipient of several major grants from the Lilly Endowment and currently serves on the Academic Advisory Boards for the Pew Internet in American Life Project and the Macarthur Foundation's Digital Kids project. She is the author of two books, including From Angels to Aliens: Teenagers, the Media, and the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 2003) and editor of Religion, Media, and the Marketplace (Rutgers, 2007).

Nick Couldry

Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London; n.couldry@gold.ac.uk
Nick joined the Department in September 2006 from the London School of Economics, where he had been teaching since 2001, after undertaking his MA, PhD and first teaching post at Goldsmiths. He is a participant in the Goldsmiths Media Research Programme and is the author or editor of six books including The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (Routledge 2000), Inside Culture (Sage 2000), Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (Routledge, 2003) and Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World (Rowman and Littlefield 2003, coedited with James Curran). His latest book is Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics and Agency in an Uncertain World (Paradigm books, USA, April 2006).

Mara Einstein

Associate Professor, Queens College. Mara Einstein is a twenty-year marketing and advertising professional. Her experience includes work as a senior marketing executive in both broadcast (NBC) and cable (MTV Networks) television as well as at major advertising agencies working on such accounts as Miller Lite, Uncle Ben�fs and Dole Foods.

In addition to her corporate experience, Dr. Einstein is an assistant professor at Queens College as well as an adjunct professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University. She recently published Media Diversity: Economics, Ownership and the FCC (2004) and has a number of articles about media regulation coming out in academic journals next year. Last year, her research was one of twelve studies used by the Federal Communications Commission to re-write the media ownership rules. She is currently working on a book about marketing religion tentatively titled Selling the Soul.

Educationally, in addition to a Ph.D. in Media Ecology from New York University, she has an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern and a BFA in Theatre Performance from Boston University.

Rosalind Hackett

Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville http://web.utk.edu/~rhackett/hackett.UT.web.bio.pdf. She has been teaching in the Department of Religious Studies since 1986, and is an adjunct Professor in Anthropology. As a specialist on the religions of Africa, she has published widely on new religious movements in Africa (New Religious Movements in Nigeria, ed. 1987), religious pluralism (Religion in Calabar, 1989), art (Art and Religion in Africa, 1996), gender, the media, and religion in relation to human rights (Religious Persecution as a U.S. Policy Issue, co-ed., 1999). She is currently finalizing an edited book, Proselytization Revisited: Rights Talk, Free Markets, and Culture Wars (London: Equinox, 2006/7), and co-editing Religion in African Conflicts and Peacebuilding Initiatives: Problems and Prospects for a Globalizing Africa (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and bringing to completion Nigeria: Religion in the Balance (US Institute of Peace). Her future research plans include a monograph and a co-edited work on religious media in Africa.

Peter Horsfield

Associate Professor, RMIT University; peter.horsfield@rmit.edu.au. My current research interests lie in the broad interface between media, culture and religion, such as: the cultural characteristics of mediation of religion, media and religious institutions, historical perspectives on media and religion, spirituality and popular culture, media and ritual. Other research interests have been in media and violence, silence as communication, and apology and forgiveness. I am currently working on a monograph on the historical interaction of media and Christianity. I was one of the early researchers into the political, social and religious influence of the American evangelical broadcasters. In the early 1990s I also undertook and published some of the first research and policy perspectives in Australia on the prevalence and handling of sexual abuse by religious leaders.

Janet Jacobs

Professor at the University of Colorado in Sociology and Women's Studies, Jacobs' research focuses on women, ethnicity and the social psychology of identity formation. Her books include Divine Disenchantment: Deconverting from New Religious Movements, Victimized Daughters: Incest and the Development of the Femal Self and most recently, Ritual and Remembrance: Crypto-Jewish Heritage and the Recovery of Hidden Ancestry(forthcoming). She is editor of Religion, Society and Psychoanalysis and William James: The Struggle for Life. Her articles have been published in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and The Sociology of Religion. She is currently engaged in a study of gender and Holocaust remembrance in Eastern Europe.

Tim Jensen

Associate professor and  head of the Department of the Study of Religions at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. His research interests focus on the following subjects: the notion and positioning of religion (and the scholar of religion) in public discourses, religion and media, minority religions, and state and religion in Denmark, religious education, theory and method in the study of religion, and Islam in Denmark. As a scholar and �religion expert he came to play a prominent role in de Danish cartoon crisis. He has published several articles on the subject, with a special focus on role of a religion scholar in the interaction between media and public opinion makers.

Alf Linderman

Director of Sigtuna Stiftelsen, an international research and educational foundation in Sweden. (Alf.Linderman@teol.uu.se) He is also a Research Professor at Uppsala University, Sweden. Linderman earned his Ph.D. in the sociology of religion at Uppsala University. He has worked on comparative analyses of religious broadcasting in the United States and Sweden, on the development of theory and methods for reception studies with a particular emphasis on semiotics and semiology, on methods for analyzing newspaper editorials, and on religion and the Internet.

Mia Loveheim

See entry under Visitors to the Center

Knut Lundby

See entry under Visitors to the Center.

Jeffrey H. Mahan

As a practical theologian, Jeffrey Mahan seeks to teach skills of theological reflection which deepen our reflection on God, church, community, and vocation. A concern for what narrative reveals about worldview, the issues communities face, and people's beliefs and values informs Jeffrey Mahan�'s work in field education and in media and cultural studies. Mahan serves as Academic Vice President and Dean of the Faculty. His publications include Religion and Popular Culture in America, Shared Wisdom, A Long Way from Solving that One, and American Television Genres as well as numerous essays. Dr. Mahan was founding co-chair of the Religion and Popular Culture Group of the American Academy of Religion and serves on the Steering Committee of the Association of Theological Field Educators. A clergy member of the Rocky Mountain Conference of the United Methodist Church, he serves on the Conference of Ordained Ministry. Mahan served churches in Chicago and on the faculty of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary before joining the Iliff faculty in 1995.

Jeffrey H. Mahan, jmahan@iliff.edu, is Academic Vice President and Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Ministry, Media and Culture at the Iliff School of Theology, Denver, CO.  Mahan was founding co-chair of the Religion and Popular Culture Group of the American Academy of Religion, served as co-editor of Religion and Popular Culture in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), Religion and Popular Culture in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, due out September 2005) and was a member of the ecumenical jury at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2001.

Birgit Meyer

Professor, Research Centre Religion and Society (Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam). She has conducted research on missions and local appropriations of Christianity, Pentecostalism, popular culture and videofilms in Ghana. Her publications include Translating the Devil. Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh University Press, 1999) and Globalization and Identity. Dialectics of Flow and Closure (edited with Peter Geschiere, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). In April 2000 she was awarded with a PIONIER-grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO) for a comparative research program on modern mass media, religion and the postcolonial state in West Africa, India, Brazil and the Caribbean. She is currently working on a book on religion, popular cinema and the post-colonial state in Ghana which addresses the rise of alternative, pentecostalite imaginations of community, the ways in which they clash with state-driven politics of identity and the transformation of the public sphere in the context of Ghana�fs new mediascape.

Jolyon Mitchell

Senior Lecturer in Communication, Theology and Ethics and Director of The Media and Theology Project at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to teaching, he worked as a producer and journalist for BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4. Recent productions included Garrison Keillori�Ls Radio Preachers (Radio 4 and BBC World Service) and Images of Faith (BBC Radio 4). His research interest is centred around the evolving relationship amongst media, religion and culture; the theological contribution to Media Ethics and Media Literacy; the craft of homiletics (preaching) in a media-saturated culture; the history of Christian and Religious Communication and the implications for theology of the rapid convergence of communication technologies. He is a member of the Uppsala Media, Religion and Culture Group, a small group of scholars from Norway, Sweden and the US that seeks to develop further the research into the relationship between Media,Religion and Culture. In 1999 he wrote Visually Speaking: Radio and the Renaissance of Preaching and also in 1999 co-edited Interactions: Theology Meets Film, TV and the Internet.

David Morgan

See entry under Visitors to the Center

Lynn Ross-Bryant

Associate Professor in Religious Studies at the University of Colorado. She teaches courses in religions in the U.S., women and religion, religion and nature in America, and religion and literature. Her current research is in the area of nature and religion in America with a focus on national parks as sacred sites. Her publications include Imagination and the Life of the Spirit and "The Land in American Religious Experience."

Visitors to the Center

Professor David Morgan, Duke University

Morgan edited and contributed to a volume of essays, Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (Yale University Press, 1996), which examined the history of the popular religious art of a commercial artist. The book was selected as one of the American Library Association's CHOICE Outstanding Books for 1996. Morgan's second book, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images, published by the University of California Press (1998), assembles a historical overview and theoretical analysis of religious images. His Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production, which examines the historical relations among mass production, commerce, millennialism, and popular religious images in nineteenth-century America, was published by Oxford University Press in 1999. This book received the 1999 Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award in the category of religion and philosophy from the Association of American Publishers. Morgan co-edited (with Prof. Sally M. Promey) and contributed to a volume of essays entitled The Visual Culture of American Religions, published by the University of California Press (2001). The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (University of California Press, 2005): (http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10292.html) is an introduction to the study of the visual culture of religion. Intended for students as well as scholars of religion, history, art, and cultural studies, the book defines the field, identifies major theoretical issues and themes, and provides historical analysis of visual practices of belief from around the modern world

Morgan's The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (Routledge, 2007) is a history of mass-produced religious visual media from 1800 to the present in the United States, ranging from tract illustrations to panoramas, photography, film, and television.

Two major projects that appeared in 2008 are: Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture, which was published by Routledge in July and is a volume edited by Morgan; and Re-Enchantment, a volume he has co-edited with James Elkins, which appeared from Routledge in the fall. Morgan's next project is another edited volume, Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief, a collection of essays by sixteen authors from around the world who investigate the relevance of materiality for understanding belief--not as creedal, propositional assent, but as embodied, material practice in several religious traditions.

Professor Linda Mercadante, Methodist Theological School

Linda Mercadante is B. Robert Straker Professor of Theology at The Methodist Theological School in Ohio. She has been using film in her teaching for some fourteen years now, since graduating from Princeton, and wishes she had started publishing in this area sooner.  In 1999 she was the Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) in their Media and Theology program. That year she also spent time consulting with the Social Communication Program at The Gregorian University in Rome.  She frequently leads film discussion groups in order to engage people in reflection upon religion, values, and culture. Her theological work is in the areas of victimization, gender, addiction, sin and evil, imagery for God, and the Shakers.  Besides many articles, her books include: Victims & Sinners: Spiritual Roots of Addiction and Recovery(Westminster/John Knox Press, 1996); Gender, Doctrine, and God: The Shakers and Contemporary Theology(Abingdon Press, 1990) and From Hierarchy to Equality(GMH Books, 1978).

 

Professor Knut Lundy, University of Oslo

http://www.intermedia.uio.no/people/home/knutl/knutl. I had the pleasure to be the first Visiting Scholar at the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture at the University of Colorado in Boulder. This center is to become a powerhouse for the international research in this interdisciplinary field.  The leading scholars of the Center are world class, and set high quality standards.  I also enjoyed working with the group of graduate students in the "Lilly seminar" during my few weeks at the Center. They are not many, but still represent a global diversity in terms of background; the nations and spiritual traditions they come from as well as the scholarly background they represent bring comparative perspectives to the discussions.  I appreciate how this Center integrates research on uses of the Internet and other new media with reception patterns of well-established media. Their ethnographically oriented methods are innovative.  Thus the Center is able to understand Media, Religion, and Culture in a wider context of daily practices.

Heidi Campbell, Assistant Professor of Communication, Texas A&M University

http://comm.tamu.edu/people/profiles/campbell.html. I visited the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in February 2006 to share about my work on religion and the internet and learn from other scholars working in overlapping areas. It was a very stimulating visit and I was impressed by the caliber of the graduate student I interacted with. The center has done a great job of fostering an environment where both student and faculty can openly share their research ideas, pose questions and learn from one another. It was interesting to learn more about the metholodogy the center has developed to study how people create symbolic meaning making through their media interaction. As media, religion and culture is still a developing area of discourse the visit also provided me with an invaluable opportunity to pick the brains of others doing interesting and cutting edge work in related areas, as well as think through new directions my work on religious use of new media could develop.

Dr. Garry Tregidga, Deputy Director, Institute for Cornish Studies, University of Exeter, Truro, Cornwall, United Kingdom

Garry Tregidga undertook both his MPhil and PhD degrees with the University of Exeter. He was appointed as the Assistant Director of the Institute of Cornish Studies in October 1997 and lives in his native mid-Cornwall. He has published a wide range of articles on Cornish themes and is the author of The Liberal Party in South West Britain since 1918: Political Decline, Dormancy and Rebirth (2000) and a co-author of Mebyon Kernow and Cornish Nationalism (2003). In 1998 he founded the Cornish History Network, a research forum based at the Institute. Two years later his growing interest in the potential of oral history and cultural memory led to the creation of the Cornish Audio Visual Archive (CAVA) for the study and documentation of the region's oral and visual culture. In 2002 he was awarded £172,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other funding sources for the development of Cornish Braids, a two-year fieldwork programme at the Institute that seeks to create a multigenerational profile of Cornish life in the twentieth century. The work of CAVA has recently been extended into the areas of project analysis and commercial development through Garry's successful application for funding from the European Social Fund.

Rhys Williams, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, University of Cincinnati

Rhys H. Williams has a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1988), and a B.A. in Sociology and Political Science from the University of New Mexico. His research interests are in the intersections of politics, religion, culture, and social movements. Recent publications in that area include "Ideological Language and Social Movement Mobilization," Sociological Theory (November 2002), and "The Cultural Context of Collective Action: Constraints, Opportunities, and the Symbolic Life of Social Movements," in The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, (Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Williams is currently working on a collaborative project with R. Stephen Warner of the University of Illinois, Chicago, that is studying the ways in which involvement in religious organizations shapes both personal and public identity for young people through a comparative sample of white, black, and Latino Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. Other recent writings have been on religion, culture, and place and include "Religion and Place in the Midwest: Urban, Rural, and Suburban Forms of Religious Expression," in Religion and Public Life in the Midwest: America's Common Denominator? (Altamira Press, 2004), "Religion in the City: Confronting the 'Other' Every Day," in Varieties of Religious Experience: Everyday Life and the American City, (Palgrave Press, forthcoming), "Religion as a Cultural System: Theoretical and Empirical Developments Since Geertz" in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), and "Liberalism, Religion, and the Dilemma of 'Immigrant Rights' in American Political Culture" in Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants (Rutgers University Press, 2006). His publications have won two Distinguished Article awards, in 2000 for "Visions of the Good Society and the Religious Roots of American Political Culture," (Sociology of Religion 1999) and in 1992 for "Religion and Political Process in an American City" (American Sociological Review 1991). Williams is currently editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.