Ann Burlein (Ph.D., Duke) joined the UNC Charlotte faculty after teaching at Meredith College for five years. She teaches courses in religion and modern culture. She is the author of Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Christian Right Converge (Duke University Press, 2002). Her research interests focus on religion and the body: gender and sexuality, race, and medicine (particularly genetics). Her theoretical interests center on the work of Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and Judith Butler. Her primary lens for analyzing religion is to study religion as a form of cultural memory.
Dr. Burlein will not be returning to UNCC from her year as
visiting professor at UC Berkeley. She has taken a new position at
Hofstra University on Long Island (NY) where she will chair the new
department in Religious Studies. Joye Palmer has her contact
information, should you need/ want to reach her (or you can just google...)
LBST 2101
Western Historical and Cultural Awareness
RELS 6101 Approaches to the Study of Religion Theories of the Religious Self (Explores some major thinkers who sought to understand the various roles played by religious belief in our contemporary experience of selfhood and subjectivity. The focus will be on the modern period.) RELS 3000 B01 Sex and the Body
What is
Religion?
I am interested in thinking about how religion works (and doesn't work) in the contemporary United States, with a focus on diversity and difference (pluralism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation). I am currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled When Memory Becomes Molecular: Changing the Biological Body, Changing Religion, which explores how the genetic body, sexuality, and secularism interact by studying the kinds of cultural memories that people tell in the spaces where religion and medicine meet. New medical technologies that work on the molecular body are changing the ways that people inhabit and imagine their bodies, their families, and their most intimate modes of belonging and identity, including sexuality and religion. My tentative thesis is that if the soul is moving into the gene (as many have argued), it is doing so through a focus on the body that is not deterministic but rather embroils people in new notions of "fate". My previous work, which grew out of my involvement with North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence and the North Carolina Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, is entitled Lift High the Cross: Where White Supremacy and the Religious Right Converge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). In this book I argue that today’s right engenders its popularity not by overt bigotry or hatred but by focusing on people’s hopes for their children, I contend that a politics of grief lies at the heart of such rhetoric. Both Peters and Dobson construct countermemories for their followers that reframe their histories and identities—as well as their worlds—by reversing mainstream perspectives in ways that counter existing power relations. By employing the techniques of niche marketing, the politics of scandal, and the transformation of political issues into “gut issues” and by remasculinizing the body politic, such groups are able to move people into their realm of influence without requiring them to agree with all their philosophical, doctrinal, or political positions. |
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