Collaborative Work Area
Participants
Ananda Abeysekara
Associate Professor, Religious Studies/Interdisciplinary Studies Program, Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
Ph.D., Northwestern University
M.A., University of Virginia
B.A., Macalester College
Recent Publications
Mourning Secular Futures: Religion, Modernity, and Postsecular Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Forthcoming in the series "Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture."
2005 "Desecularising Secularism: Postsecular History, Non-Juridical Justice, and Active Forgetting." Culture and Religion.
2004 "Identity for an Against Itself: Religion, Criticism, and Pluralization." Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
2002 Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity, and Difference.
2002 "Postcolonial Religion and Public Criticsm," Nethra: Journal of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies 5:1:7-29.
Biography and Research Interests
Ananda Abeysekara teaches in the areas of South Asian religions focussing upon issues of postcolonial politics and secularism. His first book, Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity, and Difference was the winner of the 2003 American Academy of Religion Award for the "Best First Book in the History of Religions." His current research interests remain anchored in seeking to fashion a new relation between secularism, postcolonial religion, and postsecular futures. One of his concerns is with recasting the debate about the relevance of secularism in the wake of mounting attacks on its political worth and (closely or distantly) related notions of liberal belonging animated by ideas of multiculturalism, tolerance, community, and citizenship. Dr. Abeysekara is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Culture and Religion (Routledge).
Irene Becci
Social Anthropology, Max Plank Institute, University of Halle
Ph.D., European University Institute, Florence
M.A., University of Lausanne
Recent Publications
Forthcoming "Diversité religieuse et punition différenciée. La religion et le pénitencier aujourd'hui en Italie et en Allemagne." In Sandberg, B. & Jahan, S. Religion et Violence. Presses Universitaires de Rennes.
2007 Becci, I., Bovay, C., "Les représentations sociales autour de la pluralisation religieuse en Suisse," in Social Compass.
2007 "Penser le pouvoir pastoral dans les prisons d'aujourd'hui." In Porret, M. & Cicchini, M. 30 ans Après Surveiller et Punir.
2006 "Religious normality and otherness in prison. Muslim inmates in Italy's prisons," ISIM Review.
2004 "The veil Debate: When the Religous Other and the Gendered Other are One," in Titley, G., Resituating Culture, Strasbourg: Council of Europe. p. 139-149.
2004 Becci, I., Bovay, C., "Attitudes et pratiques religieuses: la perméabilité du religieux privé et public," in Zimmermann, E. & Tillmann, R. (Ed.) Vivre en Suisse 1999-2000. Neuchatel: Peter Lang, p. 207-235.
Biography and Research Interests
Irene Becci is young scholar with a significant and crucial research focus–the comparative analysis of religious difference and identity within European prisons. She received her doctorate from the European University Institute (IUE) in 2006, and is currently a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany–the premier anthropological Institute in Germany. She is the author or contributing author of several papers on religious minorities in Western Europe, gender, and theory. Her dissertation researched the place of religion and religious difference within Italian and German prisons.
Dr. Becci's methodological approach combines quantitative and qualitative research methods. Her research interests include secularisation and modernity, religious othering processes, feminist movements and post-modern theories and total institutions (power relations, spirituality and religious conversions in prisons). Her current project titled "Rehabilitating Ex-Offenders in Eastern Germany: The Interplay of Religious and Secular Values" focussing upon the practices and narratives that accompany the process of social and personal rehabilitation of persons (mostly men) after long-term imprisonment in eastern Germany.
Courtney Bender
Associate Professor, Department of Religion, Columbia University
Ph.D., Sociology, Princeton University
M.A., Princeton
B.A., with Honors in Religion and Sociology & Anthropology, Swarthmore College
Recent Publications
2006 "Constructing Buddhism(s): Interreligious Dialogue and Religious Hybridity." with Wendy Cadge. Sociology of Religion.
2006 "Touching the Transcendent: Rethinking Religious Experience in the Sociological Study of Religion. In Nancy Ammerman, (ed.), Religion in Modern Lives. Oxford University Press.
2006 "From Alleged Buddhists to Unreasonable Hindus: Assessing The Impact of Post-1965 Religious Pluralism on First Amendment Jurisprudence." with Jennifer Snow. In Stephen Prothero (ed.) A Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in Multireligious America.
2004. "Religious Innovations Among New York's Muslim Taxi Drivers." with Elta Smith. In Asian American Religions: Borders and Boundaries. Anthony Carnes and Fenggang Yang, eds. New York: New York University Press.
2004 "Yoga and Rebirth in America: Asian Religions are Here to Stay" with Wendy Cadge. Contexts 3: 1 (45-51).
2003 Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver. University of Chicago Press.
Biography and Recent Interests
Courtney Bender specializes in contemporary American religion and the social scientific study of religion. Current research includes analysis of spirituality and alternative health organizations and networks, and interfaith dialogue between Buddhist and Catholic nuns. Her current and ongoing research projects include Worlds of Experience: Contemporary Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination about the presence and persistence of religious
experiences within the cultures of American "alternative" spirituality. Dr. Bender is also working on a project mapping New York's religious worlds and will host the second component of the After Pluralism Conference in the Fall of 2007 at Columbia University.
Benjamin Berger
Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Victoria
Candidate Doctor of Laws (J.S.D.), Yale University
Master of Laws (L.L.M.), Yale University
Bachelor of Laws (L.L.B.), University of Victoria
Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours), Religious Studies, University of Alberta
Recent Publications
"Law's Religion: Rendering Culture" (Forthcoming) 45:2 Osgoode Hall Law Journal.
"On the Book of Job, Justice, and the Precariousness of the Criminal Law" (Forthcoming) Law, Culture and the Humanities .
"Emotions and the Veil of Voluntarism: The Loss of Judgment in Canadian Crimianl Law" (2006) 51 McGill Law Journal 99-128.
"Our Evolving Judicature: Security Certificates, Detention Review, and the Federal Courts" (2006) 39:1 U.B.C. Law Review 101-137.
"Understanding Law and Religion as Culture: Making Room for Meaning in the Public Sphere." (2006) 15:1 Constitutional Forum 15-22.
"The Rule in Hodge's Case: Rumours of its Death are Greatly Exaggerated " (2005) 84 Canadian Bar Review 47-74.
Criminal Appeals as Jury Control: An Anglo-Canadian Historical Perspective on the Rise of Criminal Appeals. (2005) 10:1 Canadian Criminal Law Review 1-41.
"Peine Forte et Dure: Compelled Jury Trials and Legal Rights in Canada" (2003) 48:2 Criminal Law Quarterly 205.
"Using the Charter to Cure Health Care: Panacea or Placebo?" (2003) 8:1 Review of Constitutional Studies 20-41.
"The Limits of Belief: Freedom of Religion, Secularism, and the Liberal State" (2002) 17:1 Canadian Journal of Law and Society 39-68.
"A Choice Among Values: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives on the Defence of Necessity" (2002) 39:4 Alberta Law Review 848-863.
"Qohelet and the Exigencies of the Absurd" (2000) 9:2 Biblical Interpretation 1-40.
"Picturing the Prophet: Focalization in the Book of Jonah" (2000) 29:1 Studies in Religion 55-68.
"Calvinism and the Problem of Suspense in the Pilgrims Progress" (1998) 8 Bunyan Studies 28-35.
Biography and Research Interests
Benjamin Berger is a young scholar of Canadian constitutionalism who holds an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from a Canadian university, and has graduate training in law from Yale University. Prior to joining the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria, Professor Berger served as Law Clerk to the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada's Supreme Court. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at Yale University in 2003-2004. His research addresses questions related to constitutional and criminal law and theory, the law of evidence, law and culture, and law and religion. Professor Berger teaches Criminal Law, Evidence, and Civil Liberties and the Charter. His commitment to disseminating his research to multidisciplinary academic audiences, along with his willingness to communicate his expertise to wider public audiences in the form of media interviews demonstrates that he will be an important interlocutor for the multidisciplinary conversation of After Pluralism.
Janice Boddy
Chair, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto
Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of British Columbia
M.A. in Anthropology, University of Calgary
B.A. (Hons.) in Anthropology, McGill University
Selected Publications
2007 Civilizing Women: British Crusades in Colonial Sudan.Princeton NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.
2003 "Barbaric Custom and Colonial Science: Teaching the Female Body in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan." Social Analysis, 47(2): 60-81.
2001 "Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession." In A Reader in the Anthropology of Religion, Michael Lambek (ed). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
1998 "Remembering Amal: On Birth and the British in Northern Sudan in Lock." In Pragmatic Women and Body Politics, Margaret and Patricia Kaufert (eds). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
1998 "Violence Embodied? Female Circumcision, Gender Politics, and Cultural Aesthetics." In Rethinking Violence Against Women, R. Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash (eds). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
1997 "Writing Aman: The Perils and Politics of the Popular Book," Anthropology Today 13.3 (June 1997): 9-14.
1989 Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zøar Cult in Northern Sudan. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Biography and Research Interests
Janice Boddy is one of Canada's premier anthropologists, and is internationally respected for her work on women, Islam, and colonialism. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 2002, Boddy has also served as the President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, and has played an important role in the revival of the anthropology of religion in the wake of gender and postcolonial analysis. A compelling speaker, Boddy brings together history and anthropology to question how religious traditions and religious competition, intersecting with colonial medicine and governance, work to condition and provoke women's agency. Her work on the controversial practice of pharaonic circumcision has been remarkable not only for its lucid analysis, but also for the ways it has portrayed women's own views and experiences of the practice.
Natalie Zemon Davis
Emeriti, History and Comparative Literature, Princeton, University of Toronto
Ph.D. University of Michigan, History
M.A., Radcliffe College, History
B.A., Smith College, summa cum laude, History
Recent Book Publications
2006 Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds.
2004 L'Histoire tout feu, tout flame. Entretiens avec Denis Crouzet.
2000 Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision.
2000 The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France.
2000 Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (The Barbara Frum Lectures).
1995 Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth-Century Lives.
Biography and Research Interests
Natalie Zemon Davis is pioneering figure in the study of religion, gender, and religious interaction in early modern Europe, and is a highly regarded scholar with more than 35 honorary degrees from universities around the world. Her latest book, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds, intersects directly with the goals of After Pluralism, by exploring the ways one infamous African man, Leo Africanus, moved not only between Africa and Europe, but also between Islam and Christianity. In her earlier work on women "on the margins" and on popular ritual and religion in early modern France, Davis also showed clearly how encounters with difference are profound influences on religious identity and organizations. She has led the way as a historian who has made good use of anthropological theories of ritual and religion, and has written books and articles that have at once transformed her field while also being accessible to wider audiences.
Shari Golberg
Ph.D. Student, University of Toronto, Centre for the Study of Religion
M.A., Religious Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
B.A., Honours in English Literature, York University
Biography and Research Interests
Shari Golberg has recently been awarded a SSHRC CGS for her dissertation research on Muslim and Jewish women's practices of textual interpretation. Before returning to graduate school, Golberg spent five years working as program/policy analyst at the Ontario Women's Directorate. In this capacity, she assisted in the review of the arbitration process in Ontario, which examined the implications of faith-based arbitration in matters of family law and the potential impact on women. She analysed stakeholder submissions, co-ordinated consultative meetings with faith and community-based organizations, and drafted positions papers, policy documents and reports. She also assisted in the compilation of the final report, "Dispute Resolution in Family Law: Protecting Choice, Promoting Inclusion" by providing author Marion Boyd, former Attorney General of Ontario, with critical research on a variety of topics including a feminist analysis of mediation/arbitration, promising practices in disseminating public legal education, and the history of arbitration in the Jewish community. In addition, she has developed, coordinated and facilitated a text-study and interfaith dialogue group for Jewish and Muslim women since October 2003.
Pamela Klassen
Associate Professor, University of Toronto, Department and Centre for the Study of Religion
Ph.D., Drew University
M.A., Wilfrid Laurier University
B.A., McGill University
Recent publications
2006 "Textual Healing: Mainstream Protestants and the Therapeutic Text, 1900-1925" Church History 75:4.
2005 "Ritual Appropriation and Appropriate Ritual: Christian Healing and Adaptations of Asian Religions." History and Anthropology, 16(3): 377-391.
2004 "Mothers between God and Mammon: Feminist Interpretations of Childbirth" in Consuming Motherhood, ed. Janelle Taylor, Danielle Wozniak, and Lynda Lange. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
2004 "Procreating Religion: The Politics of Spirituality, Healing, and Childbirth in America" in Religion and Healing in America, ed. Susan Sered and Linda Barnes, London and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 71-88.
2002 "The Scandal of Pain in Childbirth" in Suffering Religion, ed. Robert Gibbs and Eliot Wolfson, New York: Routledge, 73-100.
2001 Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
2001 "Sacred Maternities and Post-Biomedical Bodies: Religion and Nature in Contemporary Home Birth" Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26(3):775-810.
Biography and Research Interests:
Pamela E. Klassen is the co-organizer of After Pluralism. Working primarily with anthropological and historical approaches, her research and teaching has focused on issues of religious diversity and difference in 20th century North America, especially within contexts of medicalization, women's religious narratives, and ritual "borrowing." Her current book project, Healing Christians: Religion, Medicine, and Anxieties of Difference, focuses on mainstream Protestants in North America, and will be forthcoming from the University of California Press. She has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Canada/U.S. Fulbright Foundation, and grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Tomoko Masuzawa
Professor University of Michigan, History and Comparative Literature
Ph.D., Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
M.A., Religious Studies, Yale University
B.A., Humanities/Philosophy, International Christian University, Tokyo
Recent Publications
Forthcoming, Modernity, University, the Science of Religion: History of the Modern Study of Religion in Japan, 1877-2005. Co-edited and translated with Jun'ichi Isomae.
2005 The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. The University of Chicago Press.
2003 "Our Master's Voice: Friedrich Max Müller after a Hundred Years of Solitude." Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 15: 4.
2000 "Troubles with Materiality: the Ghost of Fetishism in the Nineteenth Century." Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42: 2.
1999 "From Empire to Utopia: Effacement of Colonial Markings in Lost Horizon" Positions: East Asia Culture Critique 7: 2.
1998 "Culture." In Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies. University of Chicago Press.
1993 In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion. The University of Chicago Press.
Biography and Research Interests:
Tomoko Masuzawa is highly regarded scholar of the study of religion, who continues to pose challenging and critical questions about how we theorize religion, and how our theorizing is historically situated. She holds a joint appointment in the Departments of History and the Program of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Her research in religious studies, history, and theory focuses on the history and politics of the categories "religion" and "world religions," and is developed in two monographs, "In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion" and "The Invention of World Religions or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism." Dr. Masuzawa's research into the organization of difference within the categories of religious pluralism directly addresses some of the major themes addressed in this workshop; her attention to both Continental and American philosophical currents in this period likewise will promote stronger conversations between participants working in Canadian/US and European case studies. Professor Masuzawa's emerging research focussing on religious identity and Protestant missionary writing likewise will speak to the workshop's concerns on the political and legal implications of imagined models of "religious pluralism."
Kenneth Mills
Department of History, University of Toronto
Director, Latin American Studies, University of Toronto
D.Phil., Oxford (LA)
M.A., University of Alberta
B.A., University of Alberta
Recent Publications
2003 Conversion: Old Worlds and New. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (eds). University of Rochester Press.
2003 Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Seeing and Believing. Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton (eds). University of Rochester Press.
2002 Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History. Kenneth Mills, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham (eds). Scholarly Resources.
1997 Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640-1750. Princeton University Press.
1994 An Evil Lost to View?: An Investigation of Post-evangelisation Andean Religion in Mid-colonial Peru. University of Liverpool, Institute of Latin American Studies.
Biography and Research Interests
Kenneth Mills is Director of Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto and a leading historian of colonial Latin America. His research and teaching engages with the late medieval and early modern Spanish world, with a focus on the social and anthropological history of religion and cultural dynamism, Catholic Christian evangelisation and its aftermaths, and interactive indigenous responses and histories. His recent teaching and research has focussed on the rubric "conversions to Christianities," and include an collaboration with the eminent historian Anthony Grafton. Professor Mills taught at Oxford, Liverpool and, for a decade at Princeton University, before joining the faculty at the University of Toronto in 2003. Since his arrival he has revitalized the Latin American Studies program, building links with other area studies programs in the Americas, including Canadian Studies. He has served on the Editorial Board of the Colonial Latin American Review since 1998. Professor Mills is currently writing a book around the transatlantic journey of a Castilian image-maker and alms-gatherer, Diego de Ocana (c. 1570-1608).
Amira Mittermaier
Postdoctoral fellowship at the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities (2006-2007)
Assistant Professor, Department for the Study of Religion/Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, University of Toronto (starting July 2007)
PhD, Anthropology, Columbia University
MPhil, Anthropology, Columbia University
MA, Anthropology, Columbia University
Zwischenpruefung (MA), Islamic Studies (major), Sociology and Comparative Religious Studies (minors), Eberhard-Karls-Universitaet, Tuebingen, Germany
Recent Publications
"The Book of Visions: Dreams, Poetry and Prophecy in Contemporary Egypt," forthcoming in International Journal of Middle East Studies, 39:2 (May 2007).
"Placing Dreams, Dreaming Places: Reflections on Saint Shrines in Modern Cairo," forthcoming in the Yearbook for the Sociology of Islam 2007.
Biography and Research Interests
Amira Mittermaier is a young scholar with great promise. She recently defended her dissertation on Muslim dream interpretation in Egypt. She is currently a Columbia University Post-Doctoral Fellow for 2006-7 and will take up a tenure-track joint position in the Departments for the Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto in July 2007.
Dr. Mittermaier's anthropological approach to the role of Western psychological discourses and practices in Muslim dream interpretation is historically informed, ethnographically careful, and theoretically engaged. Her dissertation "Dreams that Matter: An Anthropology of the Imagination in Contemporary Egypt" traces how Egypt's dream landscapes have been transformed through the importation of Western psychology, Muslim reformism, and the mass media. Her postdoctoral work will expand this project through exploring in more depth how different models of the imagination can rupture epistemic outlooks that approach the world in terms of either/or. She will also begin preliminary research on a new ethnographic project that asks what might be particularly modern about contemporary Muslims' concerns with the magical, the superstitious and the irrational.
Andrea Most
University of Toronto
M.A. and Ph.D. Brandeis
B.A. Yale
Recent Publications
Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004.
"Jews and the Broadway Musical," In Jews in American Popular Culture, Vol. 2. Paul Buhle, ed. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007: 37-48.
"Postmodernism and Jewish Identity." In Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture. Lamda Association for Modern Jewish Culture, Ramat-Gan, Israel. Forthcoming, 2007. In Hebrew and English.
"Re-Imagining The Jew's Body: From Self-Loathing to Grepts," in You Should See Yourself: Contemporary Jewish Popular Culture, Vincent Brook, ed., Rutgers University Press, Summer 2006: 19-36.
"'You've Got to Be Carefully Taught': The Politics of Race in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific." Theatre Journal 52 (2000): 307-337. Winner of the ATHE Essay in Criticism Award.
"'Big Chief Izzy Horowitz': Theatricality and Jewish Identity in the Wild West." American Jewish History 87:4 (Dec 1999): 313-342. Winner of the Leo Wasserman Prize.
"We Know We Belong To The Land:" The Theatricality of Assimilation in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!" PMLA (January 1998): 77-89.
Biography and Research Interests:
The 2004 recipient of the Polanyi Prize for Literature, Dr. Most is currently an Assistant Professor of American Literature and Jewish Studies in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Her recent book Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Harvard University Press, 2004) won the 2005 Kurt Weill Prize for distinguished scholarship on music theatre. Other publications include a number of prize-winning articles in journals such as PMLA, Theater Journal, and American Jewish History and a chapter on Jews and comic books in You Should See Yourself: Jews and Post-Modern American Culture (Rutgers UP, 2006). She has received Research Fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for work on her new project, Theatrical Liberalism, a book-length study on Jewish self-representation in America. Dr. Most co-organized ReJewvenation: The Futures of Jewish Culture, an international conference held at the University of Toronto in October 2005.
Charles Stewart
University College London, Department of Anthropology
D.Phil., Social Anthropology, Oxford University
Diploma in Social Anthropology, Oxford University
B.A., English and Classics, Brandeis University
Recent Publications
2007 Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, C. Stewart (ed.), Left Coast Press.
2005 “Ethnographies of Historicity,” E. Hirsch and C. Stewart (guest eds), History and Anthropology (Special Issue), 17.
2004 “Anthropological Approaches to Dreaming,” C. Stewart (guest ed.), Special Double Issue of Dreaming, 14.
1999 “Syncretism and its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture”, Diacritics, 29:40-62.
1994 Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, (C.Stewart and R. Shaw eds) London: Routledge.
Biography and Research Interests:
Charles Stewart's influential co-edited collection, Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, was an important starting point for the conceptualization of After Pluralism. As the first volume to take a sustained, comparative, and non-theological approach to religious mixing in a variety of public spheres, Stewart's book, and especially his introduction, was a vital scholarly contribution for advancing our understanding of how religions transform each other through both open encounter and implicit intersections. Dr. Stewart's research focuses upon the interrelations between history and anthropology with special reference to the ancient Mediterranean and medieval Europe. His recent ethnographic and historical focus centres on the politics and modern history of Greece and the relationships among dream interpretation, medicine, and religion.
Derek Williams
Assistant Professor, Historical Studies, University of Toronto
Ph.D., Stony Brook
M.A., the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia
B.A., Queen's University
Recent Publications
2007 "Administering the Otavalan Indian and Centralizing Governance in Ecuador, 1851-1875." In Clark and Becker (eds.) Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador. University of
Pittsburgh Press.
2006 "Monsignor José lgnacio Víctor Eyzaguirre (1817-1875): The Search for Modernity in the Catholic World." In Racine and Gallotti Mamigonian (eds.), The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World 1500-1850. Rowman & Littlefield.
2005 "The Making of Ecuador's 'Pueblo Católico.'" In Jacobsen and Aljovin (eds.), Political Cultures in the Andes, 1750-1950. Duke University Press.
2003 "Indian Servitude and Popular Liberalism: The Making and Unmaking of Ecuador's Anti-Landlord State, 1845-1868." Hispanic American Historical Review, 83:4, 697-733.
2001 "Assembling the "Empire of Morality": State Building Strategies in Catholic Ecuador, 1861-1875." Journal of Historical Sociology, 14:2, 149-174.
Biography and Research Interests
Derek Williams teaches Latin American history in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto at Mississauga and in the History graduate program at the University of Toronto. He is co-organizer of the Decolonizing History Colloquium and the University's tri-campus Americas Studies initiative. He is the co-recipient of a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar award, "Globalizing the Americas: World Economies and Local Communities," that will be held at the University of Toronto in 2006-2007.
Professor Williams' research and teaching focuses on the political and cultural history of post-independence Latin America, especially the Andes and Mexico. His areas of expertise include the history of race, Catholicism, nationalism and modernity in the 19th-century. He is completing a book manuscript, A Truly Catholic Nation: Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Ecuador, and presently researching Catholic engagements with modernity and the modernization of the Catholic Church in postcolonial Latin America.