John Corrigan

Last updated
John Corrigan
Born1952
Education University of Chicago
Occupation(s)scholar, professor
EmployerFlorida State University
Notable workReligion in America; The Hidden Balance; The Prism of Piety; Business of the Heart; Emptiness; The Spatial Humanities; Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives
TitleLucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religion, Professor of History, and Distinguished Research Professor
SpouseSheila Curran
AwardsNational Endowment for the Humanities Fellow; National Humanities Center Fellow; Andrew W. Mellon Fellow; American Council of Learned Societies Fellow; Alumnus of the Year, University of Chicago Divinity School (2017)
Website https://religion.fsu.edu/person/john-corrigan

John Corrigan (born 1952) is an American religion scholar and historian, known for being the author of a number of books on the history of religion and emotion, and the digital humanities. He is the Lucius Moody Bristol Distinguished Professor of Religion and Professor of History, and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University (FSU). He is a leader in the academic study of religion and emotion and in the field of the spatial humanities. His narrative histories of religion in America are widely adopted in university courses. [1]

Contents

Biography

Corrigan was born in Chicago, Illinois in October, 1952. He studied English Romantic poetry as a college undergraduate, writing a thesis on the poetry of William Blake. [2] Following his graduation in 1972 he resided in different parts of the U.S. and was employed at various times as a cab driver, cook, tree surgeon, in a textile mill, on a farm, at a zoo, and in an office, eventually returning to Chicago where he worked as a union bricklayer. [2] He undertook doctoral work in American religious history at the University of Chicago, defending with distinction a Ph.D. dissertation about the Revolutionary era in 1982. [3]

Corrigan subsequently held academic posts at the University of Virginia, Harvard University, Arizona State University, Oxford University, University of London, University of Halle-Wittenberg, Columbia University, and University College (Dublin), and as a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, Research Associate at the American Antiquarian Society, and the Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair for the Netherlands. [4] He was a Fulbright Specialist for Australia. He joined the religion and history departments at Florida State University in 2001, where he also was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Emotion. [5]

Corrigan was coeditor of the journal Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture (Cambridge University Press) from 2003 to 2016. He was editor of the Chicago History of American Religion, a book series published by the University of Chicago Press, and is co-editor of The Spatial Humanities, a book series published by Indiana University Press and Routledge. He is editor-in-chief of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America.

Scholarship

Corrigan's contributions to scholarship are in three overlapping areas: American religious history, religion and emotion, and the spatial humanities.

American religious history

Corrigan has written books that collectively address the sweep of American religious history from the colonial period to the present. Those books take emotion to be a central part of religious life and analyze it historically. The Hidden Balance (1987) argued that certain key eighteenth-century American religious thinkers and social theorists understood thinking and feeling to be conjoined in religious life just as they were in social and political life. [6] The Prism of Piety (1991) proposed that understandings of emotion as a physical experience were central to the religious lives of colonial New Englanders. [7] In Business of the Heart (2002) Corrigan evidenced the way in which emotion was imagined as a commodity in the nineteenth century, exchanged between individuals according to feeling rules, and conceptualized as both affective capital and a medium of trade between persons and a Protestant God. [8] Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America (2015) tracked the deliberate Christian cultivation of the feeling of emptiness throughout American history and the social divisions related to that. [9] The topic of emotion is prominent in his textbook Religion in America. [10]

Corrigan's study of emotion led him to the specific feeling of hatred. [11] His books on religious intolerance directly address the problem of religious hatred and how historically it has issued in violence. Religious Intolerance in America (co-authored with Lynn Neal, 2010), and Religious Intolerance, America, and the World (2020) analyze the history of religious intolerance in America, sometimes with an eye to broader global developments, and in relation to feeling as a central aspect of religiously-inspired violence. [12] [13]

The study of religion and emotion

Corrigan has claimed that the historical and critical study of emotion is crucial to the advancement of the academic field of religious studies. [14] He contends that a residual parochialism in the field, which equated something thought to be mysterious about religion with something thought to be equally mysterious about emotion, framed emotion as an irreducible datum and discouraged analytical and scientific approaches to its study. [15] His approach combines the history of emotions with insights drawn from philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and brain science. [16] He has advised that scholars must take care to avoid creating a highly specialized and technical "secret language" to talk about emotion if progress is to be made investigating it alongside religion. [17] He has maintained that the most promising approach is through interdisciplinary collaborations. [18] [19] Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (2004), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (2006), and Feeling Religion (2018) are efforts to bring a wide field of disciplinary perspectives and voices to the study of religion and emotion. [20] [21] [15]

Spatial humanities

The term "spatial humanities," which has been globally adopted, was coined by Corrigan, David Bodenhamer, and Trevor Harris at an expert workshop at the Polis Center in 2008. [22] [23] It identifies a collaboration between humanities scholars and other researchers, and especially the ways in which scholarship that exploits digitally-enabled representations of space (through GIS and media software) can help to bridge the epistemological divide between the humanities and the sciences. [24] [25] Corrigan and others have proposed that the "deep map," a detailed, multilayered, fluid, and polyvocal representation of space that blends quantitative and qualitative data, is a promising tool for the study of culture. [26] That idea, outlined in Deep Maps (2015), informs parts of the multi-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America (2018), one-fifth of which is dedicated to the topic of religion and space. [27] [28]

Reception

Corrigan's focus on religion, emotion, space, and power amounts to what the London Times Literary Supplement characterized as an effort to demonstrate how religion seeks to "mediate a comprehensive map of the world." [29] It is a history that offers "a complex account of group identity and boundary-making." [30] While Corrigan has "explicitly brought emotions and religion under the analytical microscope," [31] and for that has been called "our doyen of the study of religion and emotion," [32] his research has been criticized as more history of emotions than history of religion [33] and for overestimating forms of social control, including the power of emotional scripts. [34]

Academic awards

Corrigan has been awarded fellowships for professors from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright program, and he was an Antibigotry Convening Fellow at the Center for Antiracist Research. [35] In 2017 he was designated Alumnus of the Year of the University of Chicago Divinity School. [36] In 2016 he was named the Director of the Jessie Ball du Pont Faculty Seminar at the National Humanities Center. [37]

Books

The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew (Cambridge University Press, 1987; paperback, 2006)

The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregationalist Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 1991)

Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, 5th (revised) ed., co-author with Winthrop Hudson, (Macmillan, 1992)

Jews, Christians, Muslims: A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions, general editor and co-author with Carlos M. N. Eire, Frederick Denny, and Martin S. Jaffee (Prentice Hall, 1998)

Readings in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Introductory Reader in Monotheistic Religions, co-editor with Carlos M. N. Eire, Frederick Denny, and Martin S. Jaffee (Prentice Hall, 1998)

Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, co-author with Winthrop Hudson, 6th (revised) edition, (Prentice Hall, 1998)

Religion and Emotion: A Critical Appraisal and Annotated Bibliography, co-author with John M. Kloos and Eric Crump (Greenwood, 2000)

Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2002)

Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, co-author with Winthrop Hudson, 7th (revised) edition (Prentice Hall, 2003)

Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2004)

French and Spanish Missions in Colonial America, co-author with Tracy Leavelle, (California Digital Library/University of California-Berkeley, 2005)

The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2007)

Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History, coauthor with Lynn Neal (University of North Carolina Press, 2010)

Religion in American History, co-editor with Amanda Porterfield (Blackwell, 2010)

The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship, co-editor with David Bodenhamer and Trevor Harris (Indiana University Press, 2010)

Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, co-author with Winthrop Hudson, 8th (revised) edition, (Pearson, 2010)

Jews, Christians, Muslims, co-author with Carlos M. N. Eire, Frederick Denny, and Martin S. Jaffee, 2nd ed. (Pearson, 2010)

Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives, co-editor with David Bodenhamer and Trevor M. Harris (Indiana University Press, 2015)

Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America (University of Chicago Press, 2015)

Jews, Christians, Muslims: A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions, general editor and co-author with Carlos M. Eire, Frederick Denny, and Martin S. Jaffee, (Routledge, 2015), reprint

Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life, co-author with Winthrop Hudson, 8th edition, (Routledge, 2015)

Feeling Religion, ed., (Duke University Press, 2017)

The Business Turn in American Religious History, co-editor with Amanda Porterfield and Darren Grem (Oxford University Press, 2017)

Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World, ed. (University of South Carolina Press, 2017)

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America, editor-in-chief, 3 vols., (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Return to Sender: American Evangelical Missions to Europe in the 20th century, ed. with Frank Hinkelmann (LIT Verlag, 2018)

Religious Intolerance, America, and the World: A History of Forgetting and Remembering (University of Chicago Press, 2020)

Making Deep Maps, coedited with David Bodenhamer and Trevor Harris (Routledge, 2021)

Global Faith and Worldly Power: Evangelical Internationalism and U.S. Empire, co-edited with Melani McAlister and Axel Schafer (University of North Carolina Press, 2022).

The Feeling of Forgetting: Christianity, Race, and Violence in America (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Emotions and Monotheism (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Personal

Corrigan lives with his wife Sheila Curran, a novelist, in Tallahassee. [38] [39] He has experimented in joining his academic research to musical composition in various projects including the album Imperical Data From Mandalay. [40]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Religion</span> Social-cultural system

Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.

A deep map is a map with greater information than a two-dimensional image of places, names, and topography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wendy Doniger</span> American Indologist (born 1940)

Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include The Hindus: An Alternative History; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. She served as president of the Association for Asian Studies in 1998.

Donald Harman Akenson is an American historian and author. Notably prolific, he has written at least 24 book-length, scholarly monographs, 4 jointly-authored scholarly books, 6 works of fiction and historical fiction, and 55 scholarly articles. He is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Historical Society (UK). He is also a Molson Prize Laureate, awarded for a lifetime contribution to Canadian culture. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1984, and in 1992 he won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award, then the richest non-fiction book prize in the world. Akenson received his B.A. from Yale University and his doctorate from Harvard University. He is Distinguished University Professor and Douglas Professor of History at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and was simultaneously Beamish Research Professor at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool (2006–10), and senior editor of the McGill-Queen's University Press (1982-2012).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carl W. Ernst</span> American academic

Carl W. Ernst is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Islamic studies at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was also the founding director (2003-2022) of the UNC Center for Islamic and Middle East Studies.

Pan Yunhe is a Chinese specialist in artificial intelligence and geographic information systems. He served as President of Zhejiang University and Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yohanan Friedmann</span> Israeli scholar of Islamic studies (born 1936)

Yohanan Friedmann is an Israeli scholar of Islamic studies.

Bruce Lincoln is Caroline E. Haskell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Religions in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where he also holds positions in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, Committee on the History of Culture, and in the departments of Anthropology and Classics. Before his arrival at the University of Chicago, Lincoln taught at the University of Minnesota (1976–1994), where he co-founded the Program in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society.

Timothy Beal is a writer and scholar in the field of religious studies whose work explores matters of religion, ecology, and technology. He is Distinguished University Professor, Florence Harkness Professor of Religion, and Director of h.lab at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He has been Interim Dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences (2019), Chair of the Department of Religious Studies (2015-21), and Director (2003-07) and Associate Director (2002-03) of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John David Brewer</span> Irish-British sociologist

John David Brewer HDSSc, MRIA, FRSE, FAcSS, FRSA is an Irish-British sociologist who was the former President of the British Sociological Association (2009–12), and was Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast (2013–2023), and is now Emeritus Professor in the Mitchell Institute. He was awarded the 2023 Distinguished Service Prize by the British Sociological Association for service to British sociology. He is also Honorary Professor Extraordinary, Stellenbosch University (2017–present) and Honorary Professor of Sociology, Warwick University (2021–present). He was formerly Sixth-Century Professor of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen (2004–13). He is a member of the United Nations Roster of Global Experts for his work on peace processes (2010–present). He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2012 from Brunel University for services to social science.

Christian Konrad Wedemeyer is an American scholar and political and social activist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Dean Shulman</span> American poet

David Dean Shulman is an Israeli Indologist, poet and peace activist, known for his work on the history of religion in South India, Indian poetics, Tamil Islam, Dravidian linguistics, and Carnatic music. Bilingual in Hebrew and English, he has mastered Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, and Telugu, and reads Greek, Russian, French, German, Persian, Arabic and Malayalam. He was formerly Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and professor in the now defunct Department of Indian, Iranian and Armenian Studies. Presently he holds a chair as Renee Lang Professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has been a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1988.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linda Woodhead</span>

Linda Jane Pauline Woodhead is a British sociologist of religion and scholar of religious studies at King's College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is best known for her work on religious change since the 1980s, and for initiating public debates about faith. She has been described by Matthew Taylor, head of the Royal Society of Arts, as "one of the world's leading experts on religion".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guy Stroumsa</span> Israeli scholar of religion (born 1948)

Guy Gedalyah Stroumsa is an Israeli scholar of religion. He is Martin Buber Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Emeritus Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford, where he is an Emeritus Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. He is a Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Carol Lowery Delaney is an American anthropologist and author. She is also an Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Emerita of Stanford University.

David Morgan is Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, with an additional appointment in Duke's Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies. Morgan served as the Chair in the Department of Religious Studies in Trinity College of Duke University from 2013 to 2016. He is the author of numerous books, including The Forge of Vision (2015), The Embodied Eye (2012), and The Sacred Gaze (2005).

Robert Child (1613–1654) was an English physician, agriculturalist and alchemist. A recent view is that his approach to agriculture belongs to the early ideas on political economy.

Monique Scheer is an American-German historical and cultural anthropologist and professor at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where she also serves as Vice-President for International Affairs and Diversity.

Kelly Jeanette Baker is an American writer.

Mark S. Cladis is an author and the Brooke Russell Astor Professor of the Humanities at Brown University. Since arriving at Brown in 2004, he served as Chair for several 3-year terms. His teaching and scholarship are located at the various intersections of religious studies, philosophy, and environmental humanities. He has published five books. His current book project is Radical Romanticism, Democracy, and the Environmental Imagination. He has also published over sixty articles, essays, and chapters in edited books.

References

  1. "John Corrigan". Faculty -Religion Department - Florida State University. Archived from the original on 2019-08-06. Retrieved 2019-08-06.
  2. 1 2 "Faculty Spotlight: John Corrigan, Professor of Religion and History". Arts and Sciences. Florida State University. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 5 August 2019.
  3. "John Corrigan: The Divinity School Alumnus of the Year 2017". University of Chicago Divinity School. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 5 August 2019.
  4. "John Corrigan". Religion Department, Florida State University. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 5 August 2019.
  5. "Florida State University Experts on Religious Issues". Florida State university. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 5 August 2019.
  6. Corrigan, John (1987). The Hidden Balance: Religion and the Social Theories of Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew . New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   9780521327770.
  7. Corrigan, John (1991). The Prism of Piety: Catholick Congregational Clergy at the Beginning of the Enlightenment . New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-506758-3.
  8. Corrigan, John (2002). Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  9. Corrigan, John (2015). Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  10. Religion in America: An Historical Account of the Development of American Religious Life (9th ed.). New York: Routledge. 2018.
  11. "The Role of Emotion in Religion, interview with John Corrigan by Frank Stasio and Anita Rao". North Carolina Public Radio. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 5 August 2019.
  12. Beneke, Chris (2010). "Review of Religious Intolerance in America". The Journal of Southern Religion. 12Religious Intolerance in America focuses on hatred as a way to “emphasize violence and violent rhetoric as constitutive and mutually reinforcing elements of intolerant white Protestant institutions and cultural forms.”{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
  13. ""The Role of Emotion in Religion," interview with John Corrigan by Frank Stasio and Anita Rao". North Carolina Public Radio. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  14. Corrigan, John. "Bridging Subfields and Disciplines: John Corrigan on Studying Emotions and Religion, interview of John Corrigan by Charlie McCrary". Religious Studies News. Archived from the original on 2019-08-06. Retrieved 2019-08-06.
  15. 1 2 Corrigan, John, ed. (2004). Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations. New York: Oxford University Press.
  16. Haynes, Jeremy. "Interview with John Corrigan. 2018". Reading Religion. American Academy of Religion. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  17. Haynes, Jeremy. "Interview with John Corrigan". Reading Religion. American Academy of Religion. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  18. ""Bridging Subfields and Disciplines: John Corrigan on Studying Emotions and Religion," interview of John Corrigan by Charlie McCrary". Religious Studies News. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  19. Corrigan, John (2018). How Do We Study Religion and Emotion? in Feeling Religion. Durham: Duke University Press. pp. 1–21.
  20. Corrigan, John (2017). Corrigan, John (ed.). Feeling Religion. Durham: Duke University Press.
  21. Corrigan, John, ed. (2006). The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion. New York: Oxford University Press.
  22. Dunn, Stuart (2019). A History of Place in the Digital Age. London: Routledge. p. 4.
  23. "John Corrigan interviewed by Richard Schramm, 2016". National Humanities Center. 17 August 2016. Archived from the original on 11 August 2020. Retrieved 28 August 2019.
  24. Battista, Andrew. "Spatial Humanities and Modes of Resistance". Southern Spaces. Archived from the original on 2019-08-06. Retrieved 2019-08-06.
  25. Eades, Gwilym. "Spatial Humanities: Promise and Peril". Society and Space. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  26. Bodenhamer, David; Corrigan, John; Harris, Trevor, eds. (2010). The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of the Humanities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  27. Bodenhamer, David; Corrigan, John; Harris, Trevor, eds. (2015). Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  28. Corrigan, John, ed. (2018). Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
  29. Martin, David (October 6, 1988). "Standing Fast in the Promised Land". London Times Literary Supplement: 1076.
  30. Bowler, Kate (2016). "Forum on John Corrigan's Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America". Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. 85: 343.
  31. Allahyari, Rebecca A. (2003). "Review Essay: Analyzing Emotions: Prisms, Transferences, Rituals, and Histories". Sociological Forum. 18 (4): 649. doi:10.1023/B:SOFO.0000003007.20787.66. S2CID   143530877.
  32. Kripal, Jeffrey (2017). Review. Duke University Press. ISBN   978-0822370376.
  33. Tallant, Harold D. (2003). "Review of John Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century". American Nineteenth Century History. 4: 103–4.
  34. Ebersole, Gary L. (2003). "Review of John Corrigan, Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century". History of Religions. 43: 55–60.
  35. "John Corrigan". Department of Religion - Faculty. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  36. "John Corrigan: The Divinity School Alumnus of the Year 2017". University of Chicago Divinity School. Archived from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  37. "The National Humanities Center Annual Report" (PDF). National Humanities Center. Archived (PDF) from the original on 6 August 2019. Retrieved 6 August 2019.
  38. Curran, Sheila. "Sheila Curran". Simon and Schuster/authors. Simon and Schuster. Archived from the original on 25 November 2020. Retrieved 18 September 2019.
  39. Curran, Sheila (2005). Diana Lively is Falling Down. New York: Berkley/Penguin. p. iv.
  40. "Imperical Data From Mandalay". Imperical Data From Mandalay. Archived from the original on 21 February 2022. Retrieved 15 February 2022.