Statement:

I am a sociologist who wishes to recuperate Dilthey's project of the human sciences without losing the knowledges gleaned from causal, explanatory, comparative studies. I am interested in the ways in which the religious is being deployed in public life, particularly the case of religious nationalism. I am not a sociologist of religion, wanting rather to explore the position that the religious is always, already a constituent of social life. I am trying to develop an institutional approach to the study of religion, institutions not simply as valued organizational sets and types of practices, but as ontological performance.

I am also the co-organizer, with John Mohr, of the Cultural Turn conferences at UCSB, designed to explore the zones shared and contested between the social sciences and the humanities. Visit the Cultural Turn website at http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/projects/ct/

My Cultural Turn Bio is available at http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/ct4/pages/Readings/Friedland.html

Recent Publications:

• "When Jesus Votes," Tikkun, January-February, 2005.
• "Religious Terror and the Erotics of Exceptional Violence," forthcoming in the Anthropological Journal on European Cultures, July, 2004.
  http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/pages/faculty/FriedlandReligiousTerror.pdf
• “Drag Kings at the Totem Ball: The Erotics of Collective Representation in Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud,” forthcoming in Jeffrey Alexander and Phil Smith, eds., Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge University Press, June, 2004.
  http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/pages/faculty/FriedlandDurkheimCollection.pdf
• Matters of Culture: Cultural Sociology in Practice, with John Mohr, Cambridge University Press, April, 2004.
  http://books.cambridge.org/0521791626.htm
• "Money, Sex and God: The Erotic Logic of Religious Nationalism," Sociological Theory, November, 2002.
  http://www.soc.ucsb.edu/ct4/pages/Readings/Friedland/Friedland.pdf
• "Religious Nationalism and the Problem of Collective Representation," Annual Review of Sociology (2001).
  http://soc.annualreviews.org/cgi/content/full/27/1/125
• "Terror and the Construction of Sacred Space," Tikkun, Nov/Dec, 2001.
• To Rule Jerusalem, with Richard Hecht, University of California Press, 2000.
• "The Bodies of Nations: A Comparative Study of Religious Violence in Jerusalem and Ayodhya," with Richard Hecht, History of Religions (1998).

Current Research Projects:

I am working with Richard Hecht on the politics of sacred space in Jerusalem, to eventuate in a book, Jerusalem: The Profane Politics of a Sacred Space. I am writing a book with Harold Zellman, an architect, on the relationship between the two metaphysics of organic architecture and Gurdjieffian mysticism in the organization of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship, founded in 1932. The third book on which I am working is a study of semiotic order of religious nationalism, a study that seeks both to sexualize our understanding of the political authority of the nation-state and to advance an institutional approach to social movements.

Courses Taught:

I teach undergraduate courses on the emergence of Christianity out of Judaism and on cultural theory. At the graduate level, I teach the last segment of the proseminar in the history and theory of religion, which deals with contemporary critical and cultural theories and their relevance to the study of religion. I am also teaching a series of seminars with Tom Carlson, a philosopher, on the ways in which the sacred is immanent in the organization of the profane world, ranging from science and technology to political authority, money, property and love.

Spring 2003 Religion and Sexuality

Winter 2003 Seminar

Curriculum Vitae:

http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/faculty/Roger_Friedland_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