American Examples

Cody Musselman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a scholar of contemporary American religion with degrees in religious studies from Yale University, Harvard Divinity School, and Kalamazoo College. Her work focuses on the intersections of health, capitalism, and religion in everyday life. Her current research examines how religion and spiritualty became embedded in the fitness and wellness industry.Erik Kline is Assistant Professor of American Literature at University of Wisconsin River Falls. He received his PhD in American Literature at the University of Alabama. His research interests include 20th century American fiction and autobiography, addiction studies, and word-image studies. His work has appeared in the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (Duke UP) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at 75: Anniversary Essays (U of Tennessee P), and he is currently working on a monograph that examines intersections of travel, intoxication, and religious experience in postmodern American autofiction.Dana Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Global Interdisciplinary Studies at Villanova University. She holds a PhD in Religion from Syracuse University and a law degree from Tel Aviv Law School. Her scholarship has been published in Journal of Law and Religion, Law Culture, and the Humanities, Canopy Forum, and Political Theology Network. She is completing her first book, Arguing for This Land: Rethinking Indigenous Sacred Sites, is under contract with University Press of Kansas.Michael J. Altman is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He researches and teach courses about the category “religion” in American history and culture. More specifically, he uses examples of religion in America to explore larger questions about how people and groups use “religion” to separate “us” from “them.” His first book, Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu: American Representations of India, 1721-1893 (Oxford University Press, 2017) examined a variety of ways Americans used representations of religion in India to argue over what counted as American at home. He has written other articles and book chapters on Asian religions in America, religion in film, podcasting in religious studies, and American evangelicalism.

American Examples seeks nothing less than to shake the founding assumptions of American religious history. What happens, these contributors ask, if we approach our archives not with the question of how they fit into a broader historical narrative but ask instead: what does this tell us about 'religion' or 'America'? What does the field look like if we foreground the religious studies focus of J. Z. Smith rather than the normative assumptions of narrative history? This volume offers a timely, provocative contribution to the field and will be sure to inspire debate!" - Anthony Petro, author of After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion