Sean McCloud (Ph.D., UNC Chapel Hill) is an associate professor of religious studies who teaches, researches, and writes about American religions and religion and culture. He is the author of Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-93 (2004), Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies (2007), and co-editor of Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics (2009).

Office: Macy 215
Phone: 704.687.2542
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Fall 2011 Classes

• RELS 3050: Religion/Media/Culture 
• RELS 4600: Senior Seminar
• RELS 6622: Graduate Seminar in Religion and Its Horrors

Spring 2012 Classes

•         RELS 4600: Senior Seminar
•         RELS 6625: Graduate Seminar in American Religions

Research and Teaching Interests

My approach to studying religion is multidisciplinary and my research and teaching interests focus on the primary materials of American religions, the cultural history of the study of religion in the United States, and theories and methods for the study of religions. Three broad questions drive my work. First, I am interested in examining how religion in different contexts creates, maintains, or tears down boundaries and identities.  Second, I am interested in how religion both enables and constrains our conceptions of the world. Third, I am fascinated by how religion itself is defined—by academics, journalists, and practitioners—and how such definitions work in social and cultural arenas to “mark” the status of different individuals and groups.                            

My current book project is tentatively titled American Posessions: Consuming Religions and Fighting Demons in the Contemporary United States. In it I examine contemporary American religious cultures through the tropes of "a consuming convert's republic" and "the haunted present." The work argues that twenty-first century U.S. religious imaginaries can be characterized as immersed in and constitutive of an era of possessions--of both consumer goods and spiritual entities such as ghosts and demons--and that Third Wave Evangelicalism and its practice of spiritual warfare provides a case study through which these two kinds of possessions converge.

Selected Publications

"Mapping the Spatial Limbos of Spiritual Warfare: Haunted Houses, Defiled Land, and the Horrors of History." Forthcoming in Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, Fall 2012.

"The Possibilities of Change in a World of Constraint: Individual and Social Transformation in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu." Forthcoming in Bulletin for the Study of Religion, Winter 2012.

"Economics." In The Encyclopedia of Religion in America, edited by Charles Lippy and Peter Williams. D.C.:CQ Press, 2010. 

"New and Homegrown Religions." In The Blackwell Companion to Religion in America, edited by Philip Goff. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 636-648.

Religion and Class in America: Culture, History, and Politics. Co-edited with William Mirola. Boston: Brill, 2009.

"Putting Some Class into Religious Studies: Resurrecting an Important Concept." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75:4 (Dec. 2007): 840-862.

Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

"Liminal Subjectivities and Religious Change: Circumscribing Giddens for the Study of Contemporary American Religion." Journal of Contemporary Religion 22:3 (Oct. 2007): 295-309.

Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

"Popular Culture Fandoms, the Boundaries of Religious Studies, and the Project of the Self."  Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4:2 (Nov. 2003): 187-206.