Since graduation, I have been on the faculty at Kalamazoo College as an Assistant Professor of Religion.
"What are your plans?"
Well, in terms of my scholarship, first I have to do the last minute indexing and editing of my book on yoga in the U.S. Beyond that I am working on a short chapter on Ram Dev and Ayurveda, as well as a short article of on a mainline Protestant Church on one of the main streets in Kalamazoo, which is handing over it's property to a prominent African-American Church on the other side of town. I've also got a couple chapters on yoga in the U.S. and yoga and capitalism that are in the works for various anthologies.
However, I'm ready to leave the world of yoga, and actually have quite an exciting fellowship opportunity in the works. At Kalamazoo College, we have the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL), and they give two-year fellowships for faculty to teach half-time and hire a full time replacement to work on a project involving social justice. My project is on the city of Detroit and civic engagement. The project is in its early stages, but basically, I'm attempting to excavate the religious roots of government failure. Beyond spending time in Detroit and getting a field for what and is not working, this will involved a genealogy of civil society's religious roots. I hope for this to be a project that adds to the discourse on U.S. American notions of agency and secularism.
In terms of teaching, I'm would like to really to rethink how I teach my classes and move from U.S. based models to hemispheric models. Hilit Surowitz and I have been working on this together for a while now, and this past AAR we were able to convene a panel with David Hackett and Manuel Vasquez on the Americas in the study of religion. It was really thought provoking. I'm not sure how I'm going to move forward with this project in terms of scholarship, but I'm trying to think through that. This is not a short-term project, but rather one that, I hope, will span a lifetime. Even my upcoming project on Detroit will employ the methodologies I learned as an Americas student - that there are levels to understanding the processes of society and modernity, and that at times one has to work at the local level, but always keeping in mind, the state, regional, national, hemispheric and even global movements that effect these processes.
Beyond that, I'm pretty active in the American Academy of Religion. I'm co-chair of the North American Hinduism Group, and recently, I was elected to the Program Committee.
"What challenges have you faced, and what do you consider to be the most significant challenges facing the academic study of religion?"
I think like many academic fields, the study of religion has a race/ethnicity problem and a canon problem, and in my mind those two are heavily intertwined and entangled. In some ways we are forging ahead in wonderful and innovative and more inclusive directions, and in other ways we are still married to notions of content, rather than questioning why particular contents are important. I think being in the Americas track really prepared me for challenging the knowledge that is deemed most important. When looking at the subjects that scholars anoint as most important or canonical, we have to also examine the person or group of people making these decisions. The more the discipline diversifies, the more opportunities will arise to challenge the canon, but until then there will only be pockets of this - one of these pockets is the University of Florida Religious Studies Department. And it's pockets, small movements of academics that can wield enough influence to create ripples and institute real change in the academy.
Right now, as a member of the AAR Program Committee, one thing that is of concern and that I plan to address is the disparity of representation between the different groups. The North American Religions Section has six or seven panels that they get to put on the AAR Program each year, whereas Religions of Latin America and the Caribbean has one panel that they put on the program with co-sponsorship. Having benefited from being trained in both North and Latin American Religious History (because UF is an Americas program), I've come to value the two fields as equally important. And I've also come to realize how the very structure of our larger field of religious studies favors one over the other, which results in more scholars of North American religion, than scholars of Latin American Religion. In reality, the two fields and more importantly, the lives of all Americans intersect in many ways, so this structure is not reflective of the way people lead their religious lives, but rather reflective of the power dynamics that operate within the larger discipline of religious studies, which is still Euro- U.S.- and Christo- centric. What we have to do is challenge these centers and start having more of a nodal outlook towards sub-fields. This will be a life-long struggle, but one that started while I was at UF and that I plan to continue through scholarship, service to the field and teaching.
"How has studying at UF prepared you for dealing with these challenges; in the job market, in the classroom, and in academia?"
Well, I think just being at UF, among scholars doing cutting edge work who are really pushing the boundaries, both geographically and metaphorically, of religion in the U.S. into the Americas, has made me a better scholar. More than that, however, I've had wonderful mentors at UF - David Hackett and Vasudha Narayanan have been indispensible as mentors and people I look up to, and they still go to bat for me even now. I had so many memorable classes and conversations with them, along with Manuel Vasquez, Gwen Kessler, Anna Peterson and Whitney Sanford - I learned so many things, and all of them, in their own ways, challenged me and forced me to think about approaching religion in creative ways. I really struggled while I was at UF - I was young and really unsure of myself, but nobody gave up on me. Now I'm less young, with a lot more to learn but a lot more sure of myself, and because of my time at UF, I'm able to stand a bit taller and I have slowly begun to assert my own voice as an academic, which has made me a better teacher.
I'm currently teaching a senior seminar on secularity, and I'm teaching Dr. Vasquez's book, Beyond Belief, but I also find myself referring to independent studies I did with Dr. Hackett and bringing up tidbits from various seminars I took with Dr. Narayanan and Dr. Peterson. In this same seminar, the students are required to write intellectual genealogies, and we mapped them out as a class. My genealogy goes right through Anderson Hall, and it's funny how at different times we refer back to or remember different moments as we go forward... I'm sure in another ten years, I'll come to understand something else about my time at UF and probably while lecturing or in a seminar!
I would not have been successful in the job market without these mentors/teachers/gurus. But I also think, I would not have been successful as a member of the AAR without them either, which is an important part of networking and collaborating with others. I still remember Dr. Hackett making me go to the AAR, and then telling me to sit in the North American Religions Section Business Meeting. During the entire meeting, he gave me all the gossip and showed me how to observe the various dynamics among the various players. I'm still inspired by Dr. Narayanan's (and Robert Orsi's) fight to free the AAR from the SBL, and every year I go to the Program Chair's Breakfast, and my co-chair and I anger someone with a little rant when the Program Committee Chair encourages us to partner with groups from the SBL. My rant usually is along the lines of how is the North American Hinduism group supposed to partner with the SBL when the word "Hindu" does not even appear anywhere in their CFPs. This year I angered the co-chairs of the Wesleyan Studies Group (this group has three panels every year on the AAR program). More importantly, however, this goes back to the inclusivity/race/ethnicity problem that our field has - we are still married to a certain way of doing things. Divorce has been taken of the table (for now), and this particular alliance/academic orientation leaves out many voices in implicit and explicit ways. This is the terrain we have to navigate, but in order to change the environment of our field, we have to get to know it and understand why it is the way it is. This is not always an obvious part of getting a PhD, and a lot of my peers from other institutions are not as engaged with the AAR, often to their detriment. But at UF, it was a requirement, and over time, I've come to realize that one's scholarship and teaching are braided/enhanced with this engagement.
Being successful in this current job market does not mean just being a successful scholar, or just a great teacher or just a savvy networker - it require a combination of all three. I think the Religious Studies department at UF is very good a preparing students to engage all these parts of academia. And I'm so thankful they took a chance on me 11 years ago.