One of the things I love about the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama is our culture of student research. I have the pleasure of advising Sierra Ruden in our Religion in Culture MA program. Sierra has been using discourse analysis to examine the social function of award shows. Sierra's been experimenting … Continue reading The Culture of Award Talk
it was a real treat to be on Dr. Smiti Nathan's amazing anthropology YouTube show, Curiosity Meets the Past. This is a go-to spot to learn about currents in anthropology and archaeology. Dr. Nathan interviewed me about my work and my latest project, Decoding Diaspora: Signifying J. A. Rogers' Mythic Africa.
The Institute for Signifying Scriptures is launching a monthly, online seminar. The theme for this Fall 2025 is Memory and we'll be reading Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo." The meetings will take place on the first Friday of each month at 10am Pacific. ISS asks that you register at … Continue reading Scriptures Everywhere: Barracoon
How do we choose to remember historical events? With dates like January 6, 2021, we have a lot to learn from seeing them as timelines and constellations.
The other night, I got to thinking about how Domino's Pizza reinvented itself in the last decade. Rather than ordering a late night pie, I wrote a blog post about it over at The University of Alabama's Study Religion blog. A scholar of religion might redescribe the company’s reception to negative feedback as a form … Continue reading A Slice of Social Theory
