CATHOLIC STUDIES

University of California,
Santa Barbara

Department of Religious Studies

scholars from different disciplines and backgrounds connected by a tradition that spans the world

Faculty

Ann Taves, Virgil Cordano Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies; modern Christianity and American religion

Debra Blumenthal, History; Medieval Europe, Spain

Rudy Busto, Religious Studies; race and religion in the United States, Chicano/Latino and Asian/Pacific American religions, evangelical Christianity, religious responses to colonialism

Juan E. Campo, Religious Studies; Catholics and Muslims in the Middle East, Catholic pilgrimage traditions in comparative perspective

Thomas Carlson, Religious Studies; Christianity and culture, religion and philosophy

Sarah Cline, History; colonial Latin America, race, religion, globalization

Francis A. Dutra, History; Iberia, Latin America, Portugese overseas empire, Spanish, Portugese, and Brazilizan Catholicism

Sharon Farmer, History; women, society, and religion in medieval history

L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, English; medieval English, gender and sexuality

Mario T. Garcia, History, Chicano Studies; Chicano and American race and identity

Stephen Humphreys, History; Islamic and Middle Eastern history

Carol Lansing, History; Medieval history

Michael O'Connell, English; Renaissance literature

Carol Braun Pasternack, English; Old and Middle English literature, gender and sexuality in the Middle Ages, history and theory of media

Jeanette Favrot Peterson, History of Art and Architecture; Precolumbian and Colonial Latin American art, Marian imagery, early modern Spain

Christine Thomas, Religious Studies; Early Christianity, religions of the Roman Empire, archaeology and the study of religion

Stefania Tutino, Religious Studies and History; Reformation and Counter-Reformation, early modern Catholic political thought

Tipton Visiting Professors

The J.E. & Lillian Byrne Tipton Distinguished Visiting Professorship in Catholic Studies enables the Department of Religious Studies to bring outstanding scholars and public figures to UCSB for a quarter or longer to teach, present public lectures, and conduct research.

Spring 2006 - Professor Daniel Bornstein, Texas A & M University. Bornstein specializes in the history of popular Catholicism in the Middle Ages. He taught two courses while at UCSB, one graduate and one undergraduate, and gave the First Annual Tipton Lecture, titled "At Home in the Parish: Priests and their Families in Medieval Italy," on April 18, 2006.

Spring 2007 - Professor Bernard McGinn, Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology and of the History of Christianity in the Divinity School and the Committees on Medieval Studies and on General Studies at the University of Chicago. McGinn specializes in the history of Christian spirituality and mysticism and is completing a five-volume history of Christian mysticism in the West under the general title The Presence of God, three volumes of which have appeared: The Origins of Mysticism; The Growth of Mysticism; and The Flowering of Mysticism. McGinn will teach two courses during Spring Quarter 2007 and give the Second Annual Tipton Lecture on April 19, 2007.

Spring 2008 - William A. Christian, Jr., an anthropologist and historian of religion, has been invited as the Tipton Professor for 2008. A specialist in Spanish Catholicism, Christian is widely recognized for his work on visions and visionaries spanning over a thousand years of European history. He has published a series of works on Spanish visionaries, including Person and God in a Spanish Valley (1972, rev. 1989), Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain (1981, rev. 1989), and Visionaries, The Spanish Republic and the Reign of Christ (1996). An independent scholar who resides in Spain, he is currently Visiting Professor of History at UC Berkeley and co-convener an SIAS Summer Institute of Religious Visions to be held in the Summers of 2007 and 2008. He will be teaching two courses in Spring 2008 at UCSB: RS 190WC Material Catholicisms and RS 292 Visions in Spain and the New World. In April he will give the Annual Tipton Lecture.

Spring 2009 - Professor Fernando Cervantes, Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, Bristol, England has been invited as the Tipton Professor for 2009. Cervantes specializes in the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of early modern Spain and Spanish America. He has published extensively on the encounter between Christians and Native Americans in colonial Mexico. He is currently writing a book on the intellectual world of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) that seeks to reassess the place of this major literary figure in the history of early modern humanism, the relations between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and the epistemological crisis of the early seventeenth century.

Spring 2010 - Professor Rowena Robinson, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, India, has been invited as the Tipton Professor for 2010. Robinson specializes in the sociology of religion and Christianity in India. Her publications include Christians of India (2003), Sociology of Religion in India (2003), Religious Conversion in India (2003), and an ethnographic study of Catholics in Goa titled Conversion, Continuity, and Change (1998).

Cordano Scholars

Each year one or two entering doctoral students with interests related to Catholic Studies are designated as Cordano Scholars. Funds from the Cordano Endowment are utilized to help defray the cost of their graduate education.

2005 - Kerry San Chirico, Christian-Hindu interaction and exchange in South Asia.

2006 - Christine Baker, Catholic missions and Native Americans.

2006 - Nathan Schneider, Catholicism and modern thought.

2007 - Andrea Neuhoff, American Catholic spirituality.

2007 - Melinda Pitarre, modern Catholic spirituality.