Ann Taves (Graduate Faculty Adviser)

Over time, the focus of my research has shifted from answering historical questions about religion to using historical and ethnographic sources to exploring how people make sense of ambiguous events and experiences that inhabit the indeterminate space between imagination and reality, craziness and inspiration, fiction and faith. I am particularly interested in experiences, people, objects, & events that people perceive and set apart as special and in the practices and alternate conceptions of reality that people oftentimes associate with them. Increasingly, my attention has turned to the processes whereby people – individually and collectively – come to perceive some things as extra-ordinary (or not); adjudicate such claims within and between groups, traditions, and cultures; and mobilize them in the construction of alternate realities via texts, networks, movements, and organizations. In exploring these processes, I work comparatively to generate the detailed descriptive analyses favored by scholars of religion and to explore the naturalistic explanations developed by researchers in the social and natural sciences.

Empirically, I pursue this research primarily within the contexts of American religious history, the history of Christianity in the modern era, and the history of the scientific study of religion, psychology, and related phenomena (e.g., psychical phenomena, magic, superstition).  Theoretically, my work builds on classical theorists, such as Durkheim and Weber, as well as evolutionary and developmental approaches to the study of human behavior.  In an effort to bridge between the humanities and the sciences, I have been advocating a building block approach to the study of religion, spirituality, sacrality, and other special things.

Books

• In preparation: Revelatory Events: Extra-Ordinary Experiences and New Visionary Movements. This research project looks at the role that unusual experiences play in the earliest stages of four well-documented movements (Mormonism, Alcoholics Anonymous, A Course in Miracles study groups, and New Age channeling).
• 2012. What Matters: Ethnographies of Value in the (Not So) Secular Age, co-edited with Courtney Bender (Columbia).
• 2009. Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton).
• 1999. Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton).
• 1989. Religion and Domestic Violence: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey (Indiana).  Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• 1986. The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (Notre Dame, 1986 [hc], 1990 [pb]).

Selected Articles, Reviews & Entries

• In preparation: “Mapping Significance: A Building Block Approach” (invited lecture, annual meeting of the Geography of Religions and Belief Systems Specialty Group).
• In preparation: “A Tale of Two Congresses: The Psychological Study of Occult, Mystical, and Religious Phenomena, 1900-1909.
• Under review: “Reverse Engineering Complex Cultural Concepts: Identifying Building Blocks of ‘Religion.’”
• In press, “Hiding in Plain Sight: The Organizational Forms of ‘Unorganized Religion’” with Michael Kinsella, in New Age Spirituality and Theories of Religion: A Comparative Approach, ed. S. J. Sutcliffe and I. S. Gilhus (Equinox).
• In press: “Building Blocks of Sacralities,” in Raymond F. Paloutzian and Crystal Park, eds., Handbook of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2nd ed. (Guilford).
• In press: “Non-Ordinary Powers: Charisma, Special Affordances and the Study of Religion,” in Dimitris Xygalatas and Lee McCorkle, eds. Mental Culture: Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion (Equinox).
• 2011.”‘Religion’ in the Humanities and the Humanities in the University,” Presidential Plenary Address, American Academy of Religion, October 30, 2010, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79/2, 287-314.
• 2010. “No Field is an Island: Fostering Collaboration Between the Academic Study of Religion and the Sciences,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22 (2010): 170-188.
• 2010. “Experience as Site of Contested Meaning and Value: The Attributional Dog and Its Special Tail,” Religion 40/4, 317-323. [Response to articles discussing Religious Experience Reconsidered.]
• 2009. “William James Revisited: Rereading the Varieties of Religious Experience in Transatlantic Perspective,” Zygon 44/2, 415-32.
• 2009. “Channeled Apparitions: On Visions That Morph and Categories That Slip,” Visual Resources 25/1, 141-56.
• 2006. “Where (Fragmented) Selves Meet Cultures: Theorizing Spirit Possession,” Culture and Religion 7/2, 123-38.
• 2004. “Religious Experience,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (Macmillan).
• 2003. “Religious Experience and the Divisible Self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as Theorist(s) of Religion, JAAR 71/2, 303-326.
• 2003. “Detachment and Engagement in the Study of ‘Lived Experience,’” Spiritus: A Journal of Spirituality 3, 186-208.

Courses Taught

• RG ST 25: Global Catholicism Today
• RG ST 101A: New Religious Movements
• RG ST 101B: Religious Experience
• RG ST 138: Topics in Catholic Studies
• RG ST 172: Evolutionary and Cognitive Science of Religion
• RG ST 200A: Proseminar in the History and Theory of Religion
• RG ST 237: Seminar in the Scientific Study of Religion