Fulbright American Studies

Catherine L. Albanese is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of the widely used textbook America: Religions and Religion, now in its third edition, and of numerous other articles and books, including Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Her most recent publications are American Spiritualities: A Reader, Reconsidering Nature Religion, and "American Religious History: A Bibliographical Essay," just published by the U.S. State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and available on-line at http://exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents.htm. In April 2003, Albanese was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to complete her next book, A Republic of Mystics and Metaphysicians: A Cultural History of U.S. Metaphysical Religion. Albanese is a former president of the American Academy of Religion. <more info...>

BarBara K. Bodine, a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, is currently Diplomat in Residence at the University of Southern California, Santa Barbara. She last served as U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen.

Eve Darian-Smith is Associate Professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a former lawyer and trained cultural anthropologist, she is interested in the connections and intersections between legal and cultural processes and the impact of legal pluralism. Her books include the award winning Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe, a co-edited volume titled Laws of the Postcolonial, and most recently New Capitalists: Law, Politics, and Identity Surrounding Casino Gaming On Native American Land.
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Robert Ellwood is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Roger Friedland is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Phillip E. Hammond retired in July, 2002, as the D. Mackenzie Brown Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He was a university professor for 42 years, teaching at Yale, Wisconsin, Arizona, the final 24 tears at UCSB. He remains active, teaching an occasional course, and he is involved in two book projects. His last three books are With Liberty For All, Soka Gakkai In America, and The Dynamics of Religious Organizations. <more info...>

Richard Hecht is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Mark Juergensmeyer is director of Global and International Studies and professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published more than two hundred articles and a dozen books.

His widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition 2003), is based on interviews with violent religious activists around the world--including individuals convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States--and was listed by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. A previous book, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press 1993) covers the rise of religious activism and its confrontation with secular modernity. It was named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. His book on Gandhian conflict resolution has recently been reprinted as Gandhi's Way (University of California Press 2002), and his most recent book is an edited volume, Global Religions (Oxford University Press 2003).

He has received research fellowships from the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the 2003 recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for contributions to the study of religion, and is the 2004 recipient of the Silver Award of the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Spain. Since the events of September 11 he has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, Fox News and ABC's Politically Incorrect. <more info...>

Gary M. Laderman is Associate Professor of Religion at Emory University Atlanta, GA. <more info...>

Katherine McClymond is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. An alumna of UCSB's Religious Studies PhD program, her research interests are Comparative History of Religions, Hinduism, Judaism, Ritual Theory, and Religion and Literature. In addition to courses in those interests, she regulalry offers courses on the religious dimensions of the Holocaust, biblical studies, women and Religion, and world religions. <more info...>

J. Gordon Melton is a leading expert in the study of new religious movements (NRMs). In 1969 he founded the Institute for the Study of American Religion which has pioneered research on North American religious groups and is the author of the Encyclopedia of American Religion (5th edition, 1996). He is the senior editor for the Directory of European Religions. Additionally, he has authored and edited some 25 books on American Religions including the Religious Leaders of America, the Encyclopedia of African American Religions, The Church of Scientology and the award-winning New Age Encyclopedia. <more info...>

Kathleen M. Moore is Associate Professor and Chair of the Law & Society Program at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her research interests includes immigration, Muslim communities in the West (e.g., U.S., U.K.), religion and law, Islamic law, civil rights and liberties, cultural pluralism, and cultural studies.

Rhonda Parks-Manville is an award-winning writer at the Santa Barbara News-Press, where she has covered the religion beat for the past six years. She earned a master's degree from UCSB's Department of Religious Studies in 2000, and she won American Academy of Religion's award for best in-depth reporting on religion in 2001.

Jan Shipps is professor emeritus of history and religious studies at IUPUI, and research associate at The Polis Center. She is generally regarded as the foremost non-Mormon scholar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Her first book on the subject was Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition published by the University of Illinois Press.

Paul Spickard teaches history and Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara. Educated at Harvard and Berkeley, he has taught at nine other institutions, including a community college, liberal arts colleges, and research universities. Among his books are: Racial Thinking in the United States (2004); Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (2003); Pacific Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and Across the Pacific (2003); We Are a People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity (2001); Japanese Americans (1996); and Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (1989). His current projects involve a comparative history of ethnic systems around the world and a book reframing American immigration history from the race and power perspective of ethnic studies.

Ines Talamantez is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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