D Schaefer
Biographic Data
| ID | 418944 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Schaefer |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Schaefer |
| SIGNATURE | SCHAEFER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | California University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2385-1946 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
We Secular Animals: Persuasion, Passion, and the Diversity of Thought
Our Westminster: Race and the Material Secular at Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery
Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia is one of the most iconic cemeteries in the United States, featuring an array of significant memorials and graves relating to the US Civil War. The Hollywood Memorial Association, a group of middle and upper-class white women, would play an outsize role in remaking Richmond as Confederate holy ground. They began with Hollywood Cemetery itself—which they came to call “Our Westminster”—establishing it as the…
Religious Studies in the Garden of Academic Delights
This response to the symposium on Wild Experiment examines the running theme of the emotional aspects of scholarship, especially as it applies to religious studies. This includes consideration of the role of affects in transphobic misunderstandings of science, the scholarship of Jonathan Z. Smith and its skepticism toward emotion, and the imbrication of affect and race science
The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion
Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China, By Ting Guo
Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America’s Obsession with Religion by Jason Bivins (review)
Reviewed by: Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America's Obsession with Religion by Jason Bivins Donovan O. Schaefer Jason Bivins, Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America's Obsession with Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) Jason Bivins's Embattled America is a superb introduction to historical currents in the US—especially in the aftermath of the cultural transformations of the 1960s—that have led t…
Voracious secularism: Emotional Habitus and the Desire for Knowledge in Animal Experimentation
The conventional formula for dividing religious and secular connects religion to emotion and secularity to rationality. However, recent work in what has been called critical secularism studies has challenged this orientation. This scholarship has proposed that the line between secular and religious is blurry, and that we should expect the secular to be determined by embodied emotion just as much as religion. Postcolonial theorist Saba Mahmood cal…
Feeling Material Culture: Affect, Power, Sensation
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDonovan SchaeferDonovan Schaefer is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Duke UP, 2015) and Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke UP, 2022). [email protected]
Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin
"Wild Experiment argues that feeling and thinking are not separate. Drawing on a range of fields including science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and the post-critical turn in literary studies, it reconceptualizes thinking as not just connected to feeling, but defined by it. This has implications for how we understand domains often imagined to be beyond emotion, including science, secularism, and atheism. The …
Visions of Contempt: Emotion and the Visual Culture of the Scopes Trial
This article examines the visual culture of the 1925 Scopes Trial, including editorial cartoons from contemporary periodicals and the 1960 film version of Inherit the Wind. Combining studies of material religion with affect theory, it suggests that this network of imagery instantiates an "economy of dignity" in which different factions seek to consolidate their positions through visual representations of shame and pride. Content Warning: This art…
Darwin's Orchids
Is there a queer Darwin? It is often assumed that Darwinian biology is an ally of conservative approaches to sexuality and gender. The Christian legal framework known as natural law philosophy, for instance, reads Darwin as a champion of heterosexual coupling, proving the biological imperative of straight sex. Some feminist readings of Darwin (such as that of Elizabeth Grosz) find in Darwin a confirmation of the necessity of sexual difference org…
Portrait: Talal Asad
Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion, Talal AsadFor Talal, Jonathan BoyarinOn Anthropology as Translation, Nadia FadilFriendship and Time in the Work of Talal Asad, Hussein Ali AgramaTalal Asad's Challenge to Religious Studies, Donovan O. SchaeferFinding Talal Asad in and beyond Buddhist Studies: Agency and Race in Modern Pasts, Ananda Abeysekara
The Secular Twist: Nonreligion in the World Religions Classroom
Is Secularism a World Religion
Podcast with Donovan Schaefer, 28 November 2016 Interviewed by Christopher R. Cotter Transcribed by Catrin J. Sawford Audio and transcript available at: https://religiousstudiesproject.com/ podcast/is-secularism-a-world-religion
The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power
Across the humanities, a set of interrelated concepts - excess, becoming, the event - have gained purchase as analytical tools for thinking about power. Some versions of affect theory rely on Gilles Deleuze's concept of 'becoming', proposing that affect is best understood as a field of dynamic novelty. Reconsidering affect theory's relationship with life sciences, Schaefer argues that this procedure fails as a register of the analytics of power. …
Whiteness and civilization: Shame, race, and the rhetoric of Donald Trump
This essay draws on affect theory to develop an account of Donald Trump's rhetorical methods. Building on the work of other scholars who have linked affect theory to Communication Studies, this paper argues that the success of Trump's rhetoric emerges, in part, through his mastery of a circuit of shame and dignity, in which supporters—especially white supporters—who feel ashamed find, in his verbal and visual style, a repudiation of shame. After …
Precopulatory Sexual Cannibalism and Other Accidents: Evolution, Material Trans Theory, and Natural Law
Natural law perspectives take existing formations of life-matter and translate them into normative templates. From an evolutionary perspective, the normative aspect of natural law is always under suspicion. Because life-forms have histories and futures that are shaped by a dynamic of accidents, they are not susceptible to normative assertions about what they “should” be or do. This is particularly the case with sex. Sexual reproduction is a minor…
You Don’t Know What Pain Is: Affect, the Lifeworld, and Animal Ethics
Affect theory is a subfield that encourages us to think about how we interact with each other and the world along registers that are not reducible to language. This has suggested to some scholars that affect theory can also be used to better understand the experience of animals. This article explores a merger between affect theory, animal studies and the lifeworld tradition of phenomenology. The upshot of this is a way of seeing how animals, like…
Heavenbeast: A New Materialist Approach to Ulysses
James Joyce’s Ulysses can be read through the prism of the New Materialist School of contemporary critical thought to shed light on ongoing questions in the humanities about the relationship between language and embodiment. Specifically, Ulysses resonates with three thematic concerns of New Materialisms: the nature of matter, the correspondence between human and animal, and the role of affect. Contra some calls for the humanities to retrench in a…
Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power
Embodied Disbelief: Poststructural Feminist Atheism
I quite rightly pass for an atheist," Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the "idea" of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging-straightening out-religion. In this paper, I will argue that…
Do Animals Have Religion? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Religion and Embodiment
The field of religious studies has recently begun to explore a number of aspects of the relationship between animals and religion. The bulk of these explorations have been focused on reconsidering human ethical relationships with animals in light of religious values or exploring the textual and ritual meanings of animal bodies against the background of human religions. Another line of inquiry, the topic of this paper, looks at the religious exper…
Whiteness and civilization: Shame, race, and the rhetoric of Donald Trump
This essay draws on affect theory to develop an account of Donald Trump's rhetorical methods. Building on the work of other scholars who have linked affect theory to Communication Studies, this paper argues that the success of Trump's rhetoric emerges, in part, through his mastery of a circuit of shame and dignity, in which supporters—especially white supporters—who feel ashamed find, in his verbal and visual style, a repudiation of shame. After …
Portrait: Talal Asad
Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion, Talal AsadFor Talal, Jonathan BoyarinOn Anthropology as Translation, Nadia FadilFriendship and Time in the Work of Talal Asad, Hussein Ali AgramaTalal Asad's Challenge to Religious Studies, Donovan O. SchaeferFinding Talal Asad in and beyond Buddhist Studies: Agency and Race in Modern Pasts, Ananda Abeysekara
Embodied Disbelief: Poststructural Feminist Atheism
I quite rightly pass for an atheist," Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the "idea" of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging-straightening out-religion. In this paper, I will argue that…
Do Animals Have Religion? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Religion and Embodiment
The field of religious studies has recently begun to explore a number of aspects of the relationship between animals and religion. The bulk of these explorations have been focused on reconsidering human ethical relationships with animals in light of religious values or exploring the textual and ritual meanings of animal bodies against the background of human religions. Another line of inquiry, the topic of this paper, looks at the religious exper…
You Don’t Know What Pain Is: Affect, the Lifeworld, and Animal Ethics
Affect theory is a subfield that encourages us to think about how we interact with each other and the world along registers that are not reducible to language. This has suggested to some scholars that affect theory can also be used to better understand the experience of animals. This article explores a merger between affect theory, animal studies and the lifeworld tradition of phenomenology. The upshot of this is a way of seeing how animals, like…
Visions of Contempt: Emotion and the Visual Culture of the Scopes Trial
This article examines the visual culture of the 1925 Scopes Trial, including editorial cartoons from contemporary periodicals and the 1960 film version of Inherit the Wind. Combining studies of material religion with affect theory, it suggests that this network of imagery instantiates an "economy of dignity" in which different factions seek to consolidate their positions through visual representations of shame and pride. Content Warning: This art…
Darwin's Orchids
Is there a queer Darwin? It is often assumed that Darwinian biology is an ally of conservative approaches to sexuality and gender. The Christian legal framework known as natural law philosophy, for instance, reads Darwin as a champion of heterosexual coupling, proving the biological imperative of straight sex. Some feminist readings of Darwin (such as that of Elizabeth Grosz) find in Darwin a confirmation of the necessity of sexual difference org…
Precopulatory Sexual Cannibalism and Other Accidents: Evolution, Material Trans Theory, and Natural Law
Natural law perspectives take existing formations of life-matter and translate them into normative templates. From an evolutionary perspective, the normative aspect of natural law is always under suspicion. Because life-forms have histories and futures that are shaped by a dynamic of accidents, they are not susceptible to normative assertions about what they “should” be or do. This is particularly the case with sex. Sexual reproduction is a minor…
Heavenbeast: A New Materialist Approach to Ulysses
James Joyce’s Ulysses can be read through the prism of the New Materialist School of contemporary critical thought to shed light on ongoing questions in the humanities about the relationship between language and embodiment. Specifically, Ulysses resonates with three thematic concerns of New Materialisms: the nature of matter, the correspondence between human and animal, and the role of affect. Contra some calls for the humanities to retrench in a…
Do Animals Have Religion? Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Religion and Embodiment
The field of religious studies has recently begun to explore a number of aspects of the relationship between animals and religion. The bulk of these explorations have been focused on reconsidering human ethical relationships with animals in light of religious values or exploring the textual and ritual meanings of animal bodies against the background of human religions. Another line of inquiry, the topic of this paper, looks at the religious exper…
Embodied Disbelief: Poststructural Feminist Atheism
I quite rightly pass for an atheist," Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the "idea" of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging-straightening out-religion. In this paper, I will argue that…
Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power
You Don’t Know What Pain Is: Affect, the Lifeworld, and Animal Ethics
Affect theory is a subfield that encourages us to think about how we interact with each other and the world along registers that are not reducible to language. This has suggested to some scholars that affect theory can also be used to better understand the experience of animals. This article explores a merger between affect theory, animal studies and the lifeworld tradition of phenomenology. The upshot of this is a way of seeing how animals, like…
Heavenbeast: A New Materialist Approach to Ulysses
James Joyce’s Ulysses can be read through the prism of the New Materialist School of contemporary critical thought to shed light on ongoing questions in the humanities about the relationship between language and embodiment. Specifically, Ulysses resonates with three thematic concerns of New Materialisms: the nature of matter, the correspondence between human and animal, and the role of affect. Contra some calls for the humanities to retrench in a…
Precopulatory Sexual Cannibalism and Other Accidents: Evolution, Material Trans Theory, and Natural Law
Natural law perspectives take existing formations of life-matter and translate them into normative templates. From an evolutionary perspective, the normative aspect of natural law is always under suspicion. Because life-forms have histories and futures that are shaped by a dynamic of accidents, they are not susceptible to normative assertions about what they “should” be or do. This is particularly the case with sex. Sexual reproduction is a minor…
The Secular Twist: Nonreligion in the World Religions Classroom
Is Secularism a World Religion
Podcast with Donovan Schaefer, 28 November 2016 Interviewed by Christopher R. Cotter Transcribed by Catrin J. Sawford Audio and transcript available at: https://religiousstudiesproject.com/ podcast/is-secularism-a-world-religion
The Evolution of Affect Theory: The Humanities, the Sciences, and the Study of Power
Across the humanities, a set of interrelated concepts - excess, becoming, the event - have gained purchase as analytical tools for thinking about power. Some versions of affect theory rely on Gilles Deleuze's concept of 'becoming', proposing that affect is best understood as a field of dynamic novelty. Reconsidering affect theory's relationship with life sciences, Schaefer argues that this procedure fails as a register of the analytics of power. …
Whiteness and civilization: Shame, race, and the rhetoric of Donald Trump
This essay draws on affect theory to develop an account of Donald Trump's rhetorical methods. Building on the work of other scholars who have linked affect theory to Communication Studies, this paper argues that the success of Trump's rhetoric emerges, in part, through his mastery of a circuit of shame and dignity, in which supporters—especially white supporters—who feel ashamed find, in his verbal and visual style, a repudiation of shame. After …
Portrait: Talal Asad
Autobiographical Reflections on Anthropology and Religion, Talal AsadFor Talal, Jonathan BoyarinOn Anthropology as Translation, Nadia FadilFriendship and Time in the Work of Talal Asad, Hussein Ali AgramaTalal Asad's Challenge to Religious Studies, Donovan O. SchaeferFinding Talal Asad in and beyond Buddhist Studies: Agency and Race in Modern Pasts, Ananda Abeysekara
Darwin's Orchids
Is there a queer Darwin? It is often assumed that Darwinian biology is an ally of conservative approaches to sexuality and gender. The Christian legal framework known as natural law philosophy, for instance, reads Darwin as a champion of heterosexual coupling, proving the biological imperative of straight sex. Some feminist readings of Darwin (such as that of Elizabeth Grosz) find in Darwin a confirmation of the necessity of sexual difference org…
Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin
"Wild Experiment argues that feeling and thinking are not separate. Drawing on a range of fields including science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and the post-critical turn in literary studies, it reconceptualizes thinking as not just connected to feeling, but defined by it. This has implications for how we understand domains often imagined to be beyond emotion, including science, secularism, and atheism. The …
Visions of Contempt: Emotion and the Visual Culture of the Scopes Trial
This article examines the visual culture of the 1925 Scopes Trial, including editorial cartoons from contemporary periodicals and the 1960 film version of Inherit the Wind. Combining studies of material religion with affect theory, it suggests that this network of imagery instantiates an "economy of dignity" in which different factions seek to consolidate their positions through visual representations of shame and pride. Content Warning: This art…
Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America’s Obsession with Religion by Jason Bivins (review)
Reviewed by: Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America's Obsession with Religion by Jason Bivins Donovan O. Schaefer Jason Bivins, Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America's Obsession with Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) Jason Bivins's Embattled America is a superb introduction to historical currents in the US—especially in the aftermath of the cultural transformations of the 1960s—that have led t…
Voracious secularism: Emotional Habitus and the Desire for Knowledge in Animal Experimentation
The conventional formula for dividing religious and secular connects religion to emotion and secularity to rationality. However, recent work in what has been called critical secularism studies has challenged this orientation. This scholarship has proposed that the line between secular and religious is blurry, and that we should expect the secular to be determined by embodied emotion just as much as religion. Postcolonial theorist Saba Mahmood cal…
Feeling Material Culture: Affect, Power, Sensation
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDonovan SchaeferDonovan Schaefer is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Duke UP, 2015) and Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke UP, 2022). [email protected]
Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China, By Ting Guo
Our Westminster: Race and the Material Secular at Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery
Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia is one of the most iconic cemeteries in the United States, featuring an array of significant memorials and graves relating to the US Civil War. The Hollywood Memorial Association, a group of middle and upper-class white women, would play an outsize role in remaking Richmond as Confederate holy ground. They began with Hollywood Cemetery itself—which they came to call “Our Westminster”—establishing it as the…
Religious Studies in the Garden of Academic Delights
This response to the symposium on Wild Experiment examines the running theme of the emotional aspects of scholarship, especially as it applies to religious studies. This includes consideration of the role of affects in transphobic misunderstandings of science, the scholarship of Jonathan Z. Smith and its skepticism toward emotion, and the imbrication of affect and race science
The Affect Lab: The History and Limits of Measuring Emotion
We Secular Animals: Persuasion, Passion, and the Diversity of Thought
Sociology (14 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (5 works)