CURRICULUM VITAE | TEACHING |
PRESS
I am currently an adjunct professor at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia. I approach religion from a combination of historical, sociological, and anthropological frameworks. My interests include the history of religion in America, particularly Catholicism, new religious movements, and popular culture. I also have specialized training in religion and pedagogy and have written on the Constitutional and practical issues surrounding religion in the classroom.
My first book, Vampires Today, is based on my ethnographic research with the “real vampire community.” “Real vampires” believe they are fundamentally different from ordinary human beings and use the term “vampire” as a kind of cultural shorthand to describe this difference. While the media and “occult crime investigators” have descended on this group in recent years, I am interested what real vampires can tell us about modernity, the social construction of identity, and whether religion is a sui generis category. This book earned me a lot of media attention as “a vampire scholar,” but I am interested in much more than vampires.
My next book will discuss Veronica Lueken (1923-1995), “the seer of Bayside,” and her movement’s relationship with the Catholic hierarchy. The Baysider movement is a fascinating chapter of American Catholicism that has not been adequately explored by historians. By analyzing the relationship between a post-Vatican II church and charismatic Marian seer, I hope to present a model of religious history as a dialectic between so-called “popular” and ecclesiastical religion.
I believe that religion scholars should be public
intellectuals. If you have any
questions about the materials on this website or would like more information
about my work, feel free to contact me at the link below.
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