Young Scholars in American Religion: Call for Applications

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI has announced its call for applications for the 2016-2017 Young Scholars in American Religion program.

The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI announces a program for early career scholars in American Religion. Beginning in 2016, a series of seminars devoted to the enhancement of teaching and research for younger scholars in American Religion will be offered in Indianapolis. The aims of all sessions of the program are to develop ideas and methods of instruction in a supportive workshop environment, stimulate scholarly research and writing, and create a community of scholars that will continue into the future.

The dates for these seminars are:
Session I:           April 13-17, 2016
Session II           October 5-9, 2016
Session III:         April 5-9, 2017
Session IV:        October 18-22, 2017

Leigh Schmidt and Kathryn Lofton will lead these seminars.

Schmidt is the Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He joined the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics in 2011 after serving as the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School from 2009 to 2011. Previous to that, he taught for fourteen years in the Department of Religion at Princeton University, including a stint as department chair and multiple shifts as director of graduate studies.  His books include: Heaven’s Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (2010); Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (2005); Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (2000); Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (1995); and Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (1989). His next book project, Village Atheists: A Cultural History of American Unbelief, is due out from Princeton University Press in late 2016.

Lofton is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Professor of Religious Studies, American Studies, History and Divinity at Yale University. A historian and cultural critic, her research focuses on the problem of religion in modernity. She has written about modernism, consumerism, celebrity, and secularism. Her book in progress, Consuming Religion, includes examinations of Goldman Sachs, Kim Kardashian, and parenting as subjects for the study of religion. Lofton has served as an editor-at-large for the Immanent Frame; she co-curated (with John Lardas Modern) a collaborative web project titled Frequencies; and she has recently launched (also with John Lardas Modern) Class 200: New Studies in Religion, a book series with University of Chicago Press. For her work at Yale she has won the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching, the Sarai Ribicoff Award for the Encouragement of Teaching at Yale College, and the Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities.

Eligibility: Scholars eligible to apply are those who have launched their careers within the last seven years and who are working in a subfield of the area of religion in North America, broadly understood. Ten scholars will be selected, with the understanding that they will commit to the program for all dates. Each participant will be expected to produce a course syllabus, with justification of teaching approach, and a publishable research article. Costs for transportation, lodging, and meals for the seminars will be covered, and there is no application fee.

To Apply: Applicants must submit: (a) a curriculum vitae; (b) three letters of reference directly supporting their application to the program (do not send portfolios with generic reference letters); and (c) a 700-word essay indicating why they are interested in participating, their current and projected research, and teaching interests. The deadline for applications is 16 November 2015. Essays, CVs, and letters of reference should be sent in PDF format to raac@iupui.edu. (Letters of reference should be submitted directly by referees.)

For those interested in learning more about the program, the 2014-2016 YSAR leaders, Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Douglas Winiarski, talked about the program and its current participants with Kristian Petersen over at Marginalia. The Young Scholars program also has been mentioned more than a few times on this blog. YSAR has provided numerous posts through contributors who have been participants in the program and books we've discussed--not to mention our Blogmeister Emeritus Extraordinaire Paul Harvey's service as a leader of the 2007-2009 seminar. The program also has been a topic of conversation over at the S-USIH blog where Ray Haberski referred to it as the source of more than a mere "wave" of scholarship, but a "tsunami" of scholarship. (The collection of syllabi could be included in that too.)