2021-2023 | Dr. Evan Berry is an Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He has previously taught at American University and Lewis and Clark College. His research examines the relationship between religion and the public sphere in contemporary societies, with special attention to the way religious ideas and organizations are mobilized in response to climate change and other global environmental challenges. Berry is the author of Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism (University of California Press, 2015), which traces the influence of Christian theology on the environmental movement in the United States. |
2018-2021 | Dr. Mark Peterson is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Originally from Honolulu, raised in Minneapolis, Uppsala, Sweden, Chicago, Mobile, and Toronto. He has lived in Riga, Shanghai and West Bend, Wisconsin. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, he is also a member of the Ukulele World Congress. |
2015-2018 | Dr. Sarah Pike is Professor of Comparative Religion at California State University, Chico. Her training is in religion in America and her research and teaching blend ethnographic and historical methods and materials with an ongoing interest in how religion is practiced and lived outside institutions. Her research has focused on ritual studies and new religious movements and she has written numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary Paganism, ritual, the New Age movement, the Burning Man festival, spiritual dance, environmental activism, and youth culture. Much of her current research focuses on the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Her ethnography of contemporary Pagan festivals, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community, was published by the University of California Press (2001). Her book New Age and Neopagan Religions in America was published by Columbia University Press (2004) in the Contemporary American Religion Series and was named a Choice “Outstanding Academic Title.” Her most recent book, For the Wild: Ritual and Commitment in Radical Eco-Activism, was published by the University of California Press (2017). |
2011-2015 | Dr. Hobgood-Oster, Professor of Religion at Southwestern University, is specialized in animals in the history of the Christian tradition, contemporary religious-ethical issues related to other-than-human animals, Ecofeminism, and human-animal studies. She holds the Elizabeth Root Paden Chair in Religion and Environmental Studies at Southwestern and is a frequently invited lecturer. |
2009-2011 | Kocku von Stuckrad is Full Professor of Religious Studies and since 2013 the Dean of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has published extensively on topics related to the cultural history of religion in Europe, method and theory in the study of religion, discursive study of religion, the diversity of knowledge systems, esoteric and mystical traditions in European intellectual history, religion and (philosophies of) nature, as well as on religion and secularity. He has written eight books, which were translated into five languages. He has published ten edited volumes, including two leading dictionaries of religion. He is founding editor of the Journal of Religion in Europe (Leiden & Boston: Brill), as well as co-editor of the Numen Book Series (Leiden & Boston: Brill), the Texts and Sources in the History of Religions series (Leiden & Boston: Brill), the Supplements to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion series (Leiden & Boston: Brill), and the Religion and Society series (Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter). Professor von Stuckrad served as President of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC) and was a founding board member of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE). Currently he is President of the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion (NGG). He was co-chair of the Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group and is currently the co-chair of the Religion in Europe Group of the American Academy of Religion. In 2011 he was appointed as Honorary Professor of the Study of Religion at Aarhus University, Denmark. |
2005-2009 | Taylor, who founded the ISSRNC in 2007, has been a central figure in the articulation and construction of religion and nature as a field of study. He earned his Ph.D. in Social Ethics from the University of Southern California (1988) and began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. While there, he led a faculty initiative to develop an Environmental Studies program and served as its director from 1993-2000. In 2002 Taylor assumed the Samuel S. Hill Ethics Chair at the University of Florida, where he was recruited to anchor the world’s first graduate program focusing on religion and nature. In 2011 he was selected as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany. Taylor is the editor of the award winning, multi-volume Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005) and has authored or edited five books including the landmark Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (2010). In 2007 Taylor founded, and has since edited, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture. Taylor’s long-term research trajectory has centered on grassroots environmentalism and on the role of the affective, spiritual and ethical dimensions of human experience on environmental mobilization. In Dark Green Religion he analyzed the emergence, impact, and prospects of “green religions” around the world. Most recently, he has co-authored a comprehensive research review of the role of religion in environmental behavior. Taylor’s research, publications, presentations, initiatives, and courses can be found at his website: http://www.brontaylor.com. |
