Dr. Richard J. Callahan, Jr., is interested in the intersections of religion, cultures of work, natural resource extraction, and comparative studies of religions and globalization. He received his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his MA in Folklore and Folklife Studies at Western Kentucky University. Dr. Callahan is the author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust, and editor of New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase and The Bloomsbury Reader in the Study of Religion and Popular Culture. His latest research explores a religious history of the nineteenth-century American whaling industry and its global networks of exchange in the spaces of the ocean. He is currently a fellow in Yale University’s Material and Visual Cultures of Religion program.
Book
(Indiana University Press, 2009).
Edited Books
(University of Missouri Press, 2008).
, co-edited with Lisle Dalton and Eric Mazur (2022).
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
"," with Judith Ellen Brunton and Alex Kaloyanides, Conversations, MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 3 (2022).
"," Constellation, MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 3 (2022).
"," Journal of the American Academy of Religion (Fall 2022), 335-355.
“Religious Spaces of American Whaling,” in John Corrigan, ed., Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press, 2017), 133-152.
“,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3 (2015): 190-197.
“Sacred Time,” “Vacations,” and “Fourth of July,” in Religion and American Cultures: An Encyclopedia of Traditions, Diversity, and Popular Expressions, 2nd ed., Gary Laderman and Luis Leon, eds. (ABC-CLIO, 2014).
“,” Religion 42 (June 2012): 425-437.
“,” The Journal of Southern Religion 13 (2011).
“Class and Labor,” in Blackwell Companion to Religion in America, Philip Goff, ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 71-89.
“,” with Kathryn Lofton and Chad Seales, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88 (2010): 1-39.
“Sensing Class: Religion, Aesthetics, and Formations of Class in Eastern Kentucky’s Coal Fields,” in Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics, Sean McCloud and William Mirola, eds. (Brill, 2008), 175-196.
Other Writing
"", with Judith Ellen Brunton, The Immanent Frame, April 2021.
“,” American Academy of Religion’s Spotlight on Teaching, October 2017.
“,” Marginalia, Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2015.
“,” Religion in American History Blog, April 2013.
“,” Frequencies: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality, December 7, 2011.
