Skip to main content

Faculty Research

In addition to being educators, our department’s faculty are researchers in the field of Women’s and Gender Studies. Below are just some of the examples of publications, books and art installations that our faculty have completed in the last year.

Editor. Cultural Approaches to Studying Religion: An Introduction to Theories and Methods Second Edition (2023)

Examining the analytic tools of scholars in religious studies, as well as in related disciplines that have shaped the field, this updated textbook includes cultural approaches from anthropology, history, literature, and critical studies in race, sexuality, and gender.

Sarah J. Bloesch, “Flesh.” Critical Theory for Political Theology 2.0, Keyword Series. December 20, 2022.

This essay examines how Hortense Spillers, Anne Cheng, and Jack Halberstam conceptualize concepts of flesh.

Research Cluster Member, “Transformation of Social Scientific Theories of Religion: Past, Present, Future.”

Theories of Religion are generalizations about religion, traditionally stemming from the broad field of the social sciences. Theorists maintain that they are in a position to account for religion wherever and whenever it appears by typically tracing the origins and/or function of religion. The former in most cases refer either to the historical (when, how, and why religion as a phenomenon first appeared in human history) or the recurrent origins (when, how, and why religion appears every time it does so in human history). The latter – which is by far the most common ones, especially after the nineteenth century – address what religion does either to the person(s) or to society as a whole. Usually, scholars of religion tend to focus on the founding figures of the study of religion (such as, F. Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, J. G. Frazer, Mircea Eliade, and others), covering a period between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries. However, today scholars have indicated that a broad variety of theoretical approaches to religion have been developed and propagated throughout the world and from within a number of disciplines, from Women’s and Gender Studies to the Cognitive Study of Religion, with many historically underrepresented groups voicing new perspectives on and theories of religion as a phenomenon across time and space. Scholars collaborating in this cluster address this foundational topic in the academic study of religion from within an interdisciplinary outlook that is not hooked on modernist views alone but expands into and also employs postmodern perspectives broadly defined.

Vigil, A. (2022). New Latinx/Chicanx Thought. In M. Szurmuk & D. Castillo (Eds.), Latin American Literature in Transition 1980–2018 (Latin American Literature in Transition, pp. 185-199). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108976459.013

“New Latinx/Chicanx Thought”: “This chapter highlights three aspects of recent Chicanx and Latinx literature and scholarship. The first section looks at the adoption of the letter’x’ in the terms Latinx and Chicanx. The latter sections examine how the issues of representation, inclusion, and visibility raised through the use of the term ‘Latinx’ are also reflected in recent publications by Latinx writers.”

footer images of students, faculty, and staff of women's and gender studies