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Spencer Dew

Spencer Dew

Spencer Dew

Associate Teaching Professor | Department of Comparative Studies | College of Arts and Sciences

dew.50@osu.edu

Education

  • 2009, PhD, The University of Chicago Divinity School
  • 2001, MA, The University of Chicago Divinity School
  • 1997, BA, College of Wooster

Dew’s work explores ways contemporary religion imagines and engages race, state power, and law. He is interested in religious movements that are popularly misrepresented, even criminalized, both in order to offer a corrective to such misunderstandings and out of a sense that subaltern social locations lead to insightful theorizing from members of these movements. His most recent book was a study of the Moorish Science Temple of America and related movements, while he current book project focuses on the diasporic Taino movement, a movement of indigenous revival among those of Caribbean descent here in the US. Dew’s research is particularly focused on vernacular publications, from self-published books to digital publications online. His teaching, similarly, focuses on serious engagement with such vernacular sources of contemporary religious thought.

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