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Faculty - Catherine L. Albanese, Ph.D.

  
 

Ph.D. in American Religious History - University of Chicago

albanese@religion.ucsb.edu

Areas of Academic Interest:

  • U.S. Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
  • Religion and American Culture
  • Metaphysical Religion in the U.S.
  • Religion and Healing
  • Historiographical Issues

Statement:

The field of American religious history is currently exploring new models for narrating the story of religion in the United States. Older consensus models are no longer in favor. I argue for a contact model that foregrounds the meetings and encounters between religious people. Such a model emphasizes the religious combinations made by individuals as well as between and among traditions in and through their American experience. My own work tries to develop this model in a variety of venues.

Recent Publications:

  • A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
    A history of the "third force" in American (U.S.) religion - alongside mainstream denominationalism and evangelicalism - beginning from the time of the European Renaissance.
  • America: Religions and Religion, 4th. ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 2006). Textbook.
  • Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
    Uses concept of nature religion to explore various eras and movements in American religious history.
  • Reconsidering Nature Religion (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2002). A rethinking of the concept and kinds of nature religion in the U.S. after over a decade since Nature Religion in America appeared.
  • American Spiritualities: A Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
    An anthology that develops a typology for spirituality in past and, especially, present-day spirituality in the United States.

Courses Taught:

Undergraduate:

  • RS 7: Introduction to American Religion
  • RS 151A: Religion in American History to 1865
  • RS 151B: Religion in American History since 1865

Graduate:

  • RS 258: Seminar in Religion in America

Curriculum Vitae:

http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/faculty/Catherine_L_Albanese_CV.pdf

Department of Religious Studies | University of California | Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3130
telephone: (805) 893-7136 | fax: (805) 893-2059 | http://www.religion.ucsb.edu
       
Department of Religious Studies University of California, Santa Barbara UCSB