Statement:

I teach a sequence of four advanced undergraduate courses in Catholic Studies, each designed to illuminate the tradition from a different perspective. Two of the courses explore the way the tradition has been transmitted over time and across cultures. The first focuses on the way the tradition has defined, maintained, and transmitted its understanding of orthodoxy. The second focuses on the way the tradition has adapted and changed through interactions with other cultures and traditions. The second set of two courses uses Catholicism to examine the way that a particular tradition has navigated its way through the challenges of the modern era. The first does so in relation to modern thought, the second in relation to modern political institutions. Comparative material is introduced in each of these courses to frame the analysis of the Catholic tradition in light of the comparative questions that have historically been of interest to scholars of religion.

My research on religious experience, the rise of the academic study of religion, the history of psychology and psychical research engages a wide range of Catholic and Protestant debates over religious experience both academic and popular in the U.S., England and France at the turn of the last century.

Selected Publications:

• "Context and Meaning: Roman Catholic Devotions to the Blessed Sacrament in Mid-Nineteenth Century America," Church History 54/4 (1985):482-95.
• The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America, University of Notre Dame Press, 1986 (hc), 1990 (pb).
• Fits, Trances and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
• “Religious Experience and the Divisible Self: William James (and Frederic Myers) as Theorist(s) of Religion, JAAR 71/2 (June 2003): 303-326.
• “Detachment and Engagement in the Study of ‘Lived Experience,’” Spiritus: A Journal of Spirituality 3 (2003): 186-208.
• “Religious Experience,” Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed. (Macmillan, 2004).
• “Experience,” Revista de Estudos da Religião - REVER 5/4 (2005): 43-52. Special issue on “Theoretical Issues in the Study of Religion” ed. by Steven Engler and Frank Usarski.
• “Interior Disciplines and a Revitalized Phenomenology of Religion” [review symposium on Robert Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth], Spiritus (2006).
• “Where (Fragmented) Selves Meet Cultures: Theorizing Spirit Possession,” Culture and Religion 7 (2006). To appear in a special issue on “The Work of Possession(s).”
• “‘Religious Experience’ and the Brain,” RELIGION (forthcoming, 2008).

Lectures:

• “Positioning Catholics Studies in American Studies, Global Studies, and Religious Studies,” April 6, 2005, UC Santa Barbara.
• “Negotiating the Boundaries between Religious Studies and Theological Studies,” Opening Convocation, Graduate Theological Union, September 22, 2005.
• “Envisioning Catholic Studies,” Inaugural Lecture, UC Santa Barbara, February 13, 2006.

Current/Planned Research/Projects:

From Mediums to Mystics: Psychology and the Study of Religious Experience -- a book-length study of the emergence of the psychology of religion as an international movement at the turn of the last century. When viewed internationally, Catholics and the study of mysticism figure much more centrally than when viewed from an American perspective.

“William James’s Contribution to Pascendi and the Oath Against Modernism,” paper delivered at the American Catholic Historical Association meeting, Philadelphia, January 2006.

Essay on Catholic Studies for volume on same edited by James T. Fisher and Margaret McGuinness.

Experiencing Religion: Studies in Cognition, Culture, and Personality – an argument for and examples of a new approach to the scientific study of “experiences deemed religious.”

Courses Projected:

Undergraduate:

• RG ST 15: Religion and Psychology
• RG ST 138A: Church, State, and the Construction of Orthodoxy
• RG ST 138B: Catholic Practices and Global Cultures
• RG ST 138C: Catholicism and Modernity
• RG ST 138D: Catholicism and U.S. History

• RG ST 238: Seminar in Catholic Studies
• RG ST 200C Proseminar in the History and Theory and
• Independent Study / Reading Group in Religion and Cognitive Science (email me for more information)

  Click here for course descriptions.

Curriculum Vitae:

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