Description

The University of Alabama requests support for a project that aims to engage early career scholars of religion in America. Observing that the study of religion in America has often sought to determine what is uniquely “American” about American religion, the project’s leaders seek to take a different tack. Rather than trying to uncover that which is exceptional in American religion, the project will aim to embody and instill a comparative and historical approach that draws on “examples” of religion in America to illustrate and illuminate a wider range of cross-cultural currents, social issues and intellectual concerns. To that end, the project will organize an annual working group for early career scholars, focusing on the three areas of research, teaching and public scholarship. A pilot program, launched in 2018-2019 with support from the University’s College of Arts & Sciences, drew together scholars studying American Muslim comedians, evangelicals and new media, Pentecostal Nigerian immigrants, religion and black liberation, global Hinduism, and contemporary atheist social networks.
Selected by a faculty committee, through a national application process, a new working group cohort will be formed at the outset of each year. Each working group will include ten participants, representing various disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Five of the ten participant spots will be reserved for non-tenure track scholars, including PhD candidates, lecturers, adjunct faculty, and scholars whose primary professional or institutional base is outside the world of higher education. 
Working group members will gather for intensive workshops three times over the course of the year. Led by faculty members in the University’s Department of Religious Studies, individual workshops will be devoted to each of the project’s three areas of focus. Research-focused meetings will provide opportunities to workshop chapter-length case studies, which will then provide the basis for published collections of work. Meetings focused on teaching will involve attention to pedagogy and the crafting of new syllabi, which will subsequently be made publicly available online. Gatherings focused on public scholarship will serve as training grounds for participants, encouraging them to write for broader audiences, to produce compelling media content, and to build effective public-facing websites. The year following their participation in the working group, participants will return for one of the next year’s meetings, serving as interlocutors and collaborators for a new cohort.
In between working group meetings, participants will engage with one another, and with a range of wider audiences, through a website maintained and curated by the project’s leaders. The website is envisioned as a hub for scholars seeking to share their work with the public, a venue for collaboration and experimentation, a teaching resource that can house syllabi and examples for classroom use, and a repository for a range of digital projects.
The Luce Foundation’s grant would provide support for three workshops each year, for project administration, and for a graduate research assistant to support the coordination of working group meetings and to facilitate regular online posting by the participants. This would be the Foundation’s first grant to the University of Alabama.