Newswise — For the majority of cultures around the world, religion permeates and informs everyday rituals of survival and hope. But religion also has served as the foundation for national differences, racial conflicts, class exploitation and gender discrimination. Florida State University's department of religion, one of the nation's strongest and most diverse, is available to assist members of the news media who wish to place religion into a fuller context with regard to current events. A list of FSU religion professors and their areas of specialization follows.
AMERICAN RELIGIOUS HISTORY AND TRADITION
*John Corrigan (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1982): [email protected]
Corrigan teaches American religious history, religion and emotion, and theory and method in the academic study of religion. He also is the director of the Institute for the Study of Emotion (http://www.fsu.edu/%7eise/index.html) at FSU. Corrigan currently is writing a book, "Religious Intolerance in America: A History of Hatred and Forgetting." His current research interests are religious conflict, emotion in religious practice, mapping religion, and theorizing emotion. *Curtis Evans (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2005) (850) 645-6696; [email protected]
Evans' research focuses on interpretations and constructions of African-American religion, the history of black churches, and the cultural meaning of black religion. He also is interested in the intersection of race and religion in America, particularly among evangelical Protestants, since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
*Amy Koehlinger (Ph.D., Yale University, 2002): (850) 644-0214; [email protected]
Koehlinger teaches courses in North American religious history, American Catholicism, and methodological issues surrounding the hybridization of ethnography and history. Her research focuses on the culture of American Catholicism, historical intersections of American religious traditions. Other research interests include social reform and social movements in the United States.
*Amanda Porterfield (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1975): (850) 644-5433; [email protected]
Porterfield is a historian of American religion, interested in the interplay between religion and culture. She has written books on the New England Puritans, Protestant women missionaries in the 19th century, and the transformation of American religion after 1960. Her latest book is "Healing in the History of Christianity." She also has wider interests in the history of Christianity and in the comparative study of world religions. Other research interests include American Protestant thought and Native American religions.
BIBLICAL STUDIES
*Matthew Goff (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2002): (850) 645-6695; [email protected]
Goff's research interests include wisdom literature, apocalypticism, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism.
EARLY CHRISTIANITY
*Nicole Kelley (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2003): (850) 645-1567;[email protected]
Kelley's research focuses on Christian apocryphal literature, the interaction between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity, martyrdom and religious violence, the production and contestation of religious identities in the ancient world, and ancient conceptions of the body as an artifact of religious import. Other research interests include Christian representations of deformities and disabilities, Jewish Christianity and Christian attitudes toward Jews and Judaism, and ancient attitudes toward magic and astrology.
* David Levenson (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1980): (850) 644-0212; [email protected]
Levenson is primarily interested in Jewish-Christian relations in antiquity, with special attention to images of Jews and Judaism in popular narratives and historiography from the first through the fifth centuries. Other research interests include the New Testament and early Christianity, Hellenistic and Rabbinic Judaism, the history of Biblical interpretation, religious conflict and competition in the Greco-Roman world, and religious tolerance in late antiquity.
ASIAN RELIGIOUS HISTORY AND TRADITIONS
* Bryan J. Cuevas (Ph.D., University of Virginia, 2000): [email protected]
Cuevas teaches courses in Asian religious traditions, specializing in Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhism, Tibetan history, language and culture. His current research interests include Tibetan history and historiography, Buddhist popular religion, and monastic politics and family relations in premodern Tibet.
* Kathleen M. Erndl (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1987): (850) 644-0207; [email protected]
Erndl teaches in the field of South Asian religions, especially Hinduism, as well as gender and religion, comparative studies and Sanskrit. Other research interests include interactions between Hinduism and Buddhism in India, cross-cultural appropriations of Indian goddesses in North America, and Hinduism in the Caribbean.
HUMAN RIGHTS
* Sumner B. Twiss (Ph.D., Yale University, 1974): (850) 644-0688 or (850) 644-4582; [email protected]
Twiss holds a joint appointment between FSU's department of religion and its Center for the Advancement of Human Rights (www.cahr.fsu.edu). His research interests include comparative religious ethics, comparative moral and religious thought, human rights in cross-cultural perspective, and the philosophy and theory of religion. He is currently working on two books projects, "Human Rights, Ethics, and Religion: A Comparative Perspective" and "Interpreting Atrocities: Humanities in Human Rights Education."
ISLAM
*John Kelsay (Ph.D., University of Virginia, 2005): (850) 644-0209; [email protected]
Kelsay, who also serves as chairman of FSU's department of religion, focuses on religious ethics, particularly in relation to the Islamic tradition. He is currently working on a book titled "Religion and the Imperatives of Justice: The Islamic Law of War and Peace," as well as other projects dealing with the intersections of religion and violence in the contemporary world. Additional research interests include comparative religious ethics, political ethics, and religion and war.
JUDAISM
* Martin Kavka (Ph.D., Rice University 2000): (850) 645-6696; [email protected]
Kavka teaches courses in Jewish studies and philosophy of religion. His research interests also include phenomenology, Jewish philosophy and Jewish metaethics.
RELIGION AND SCIENCE
* Matthew Day (Ph.D., Brown, 2003): (850) 644-0205; [email protected]Day focuses on the complex history of engagement between religion and the modern natural sciences since the 18th century, with particular attention paid to the impact of Charles Darwin's evolutionary thought.
* Aline Kalbian (Ph.D., University of Virginia, 1996): (850) 644-9878; [email protected]
Kalbian teaches courses in religious ethics, medical ethics, gender and ethics, and Catholic ethics. Her research focuses on the way moral traditions develop and change over time, especially on matters pertaining to gender, sexuality and medicine.
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
* David Kangas (Ph.D., Yale University, 1999): (850) 644-0210; [email protected]
Kangas focuses on contemporary continental philosophy, modern religious thought and philosophy of religion since Kant, as well as apophatic or "mystical" traditions.
To find more about FSU's department of religion, please visit http://www.fsu.edu/~religion/.
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