Annual Seminar

The Seminar on Religion in the American West at the American Academy of Religion is a five-year seminar meeting for one session during each of the AAR annual meetings from 2008 through 2012. For more information about the Seminar, please contact the co-chairs.

Atlanta, 2010
Seminar on Religion in the American West

Presider, Jane Naomi Iwamura, University of Southern California

Travis Ross, University of Nevada, Reno
“Sectionalism in California’s Religious Periodicals: Place in Religious Rhetoric”

Jonathan William Olson, Florida State University
“Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West”

Brett Hendrickson, Arizona State University
“Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace”

Barry Alan Joyce, University of Delaware
“Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science and the Sacred at Chaco Culture National Historical Park”

Respondent, Tisa Wenger, Yale University Divinity School

Online access to these papers will be available soon.

--Last updated: May 4, 2010

Montreal, 2009
Imagining Territories: Land and Regional Identity in Colorado and Kansas

Cara Burnidge, Florida State University
"Conquest, Freedom, and Redemption: Kansans' Identity as the Nation's Spiritual 'Tuning Fork'"

Brandi Denison, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"Ponies, Plows, and Possibilities: Land in American Religious History"

Kathleen Holscher, Villanova University
Syllabus: "Religion along the American Frontier"

Quincy Newell, University of Wyoming
Syllabus: "Religion in the American West"

To access these papers and syllabi, login to the members-only area.

Chicago, 2008
Framing Issues in the Study of Religion in the American West

Panelists:
Sara Patterson, Hanover College
Rudy V. Busto, University of California, Santa Barbara
William Deverell, University of Southern California

Responding:
Philip K. Goff, Indiana University and Purdue University, Indianapolis