Lecturer
Religious Studies, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Editor
Bio
Greetings and welcome to www.kellyjbaker.com, the website that catalogs my research, teaching, and other wide-ranging interests!
I am an American religious historian, trained in Religious Studies and American Studies, with particular interests in religious intolerance in the U.S., gender and religion, material and print manifestations of religion, monsters, apocalypticism, and religion and popular culture to name only a few.
I received my PhD from Florida State University in Religion in 2008. Currently, I am a lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where I teach courses in Religions in the U.S., Religious Intolerance in the U.S., the Apocalypse in American Culture, Introduction to American Studies, and Gender and Religion in American Culture, Global Religion and Gender, and Race and Religion in American Culture. I also lend a hand with the UTK Religious Studies Association of our undergraduate majors.
My research and teaching interests include the 1920s Klan, religious nationalism, religion and gender, materiality of religion, religion and consumption, and the contemporary fascination with the apocalypse in American culture. For more discussion of my research interests, please click here.
My first book, Gospel According to the Klan, will be published by the University Press of Kansas in the CultureAmerica series in September of 2011. The book traces the development of the Klan’s Christian nationalism and interrogates the place of religion in nationalism both in the 1920s and today. For more on the book, please go here.
My two newest projects, Zombies in America: A Cultural History of the Living and Living Dead and Consuming the End, move my work into different yet related territories of monsters/monstrosity and apocalypticism more generally. Zombies employs the use of the popular cultural monster to navigate the interrelationships of American religions and popular cultures. What does this monster tell us about the religious lives of Americans and the role of pop culture as religious and ethical training in our lives ? Consuming the End examines the prominent place of apocalyptic narrative in American popular culture from television to film to various genres of contemporary fiction to Christian fiction and consumer products. Why do Americans consume the end so freely? What is at stake in our consumption of doomsday scenarios? For more on my zombies and end times project, please click here.
When I am not thinking and writing about the Klan and the apocalypse (and even when I am), I serve as a blogger an editor at the Religion in American History blog, the best blog around for the goings-on in American religious history and the place of religion in American culture.
Please feel free to contact me about my research, teaching, or anything relating to the end, zombies, or the hate movement. For those who want to know when the world will end, please check with a practicing doomsday prophet. For those who want to learn how to kill zombies, I am no help with that either.