Associate Professor and Chair
Education: Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara
Interest: Religion in America
Email: callahanrj@missouri.edu
Phone: 573-882-0060
My primary interest is religion in America. These are especially interesting times for the study of religion in the United States as the discipline searches for new ways to tell the story of the nation's complex history of religious diversity and cultural interaction. Trained in folk studies, history of religion, sociology of religion, and American religious history, I approach religion through its lived expressions and practices. I am particularly interested in the ways that people creatively and constantly negotiate identity, significance, and power through religious idioms in the dense contexts of their everyday lives. Similarly, I am interested in the new and often surprising forms of religious expression that emerge in unexpected times and places as individuals and communities negotiate the ordinary and extraordinary experiences that make up all of our lives.
My research follows these interests into the world of work and labor, exploring how particular occupational cultures, material settings, and relations of exchange inform and are informed by religious idioms. My first book about this subject was a study of coal miners in eastern Kentucky that looked at a variety of ways that miners and their families responded religiously to the introduction of industrial coal mining into their lives. I am currently engaged in a long-term research project on the religious worlds of seafaring, focusing initially on New England's whaling industry. This project takes me into realms of globalization, oceanic studies, and intercultural exchanges between Americans, Pacific Islanders, and others. It explores not only the work of whaling, but the impact of global networks and exchanges on formations of modern perspectives on religion as well.
2230 Religion and Popular Culture 3210 History of Religion in Post-Civil War America 4130 Haunting and Healing: The Supernatural in American Culture 4210/7810 African-American Religions 8005 Ethnographic History 8440 Religion, Globalization, and Local Cultures