February 2021
J. Kameron Carter, professor of religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington, has been appointed as co-director of the Center for Religion and the Human.
Carter shares director responsibilities with Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Provost Professor of religious studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington and founding director of the center. He follows Lisa Sideris, who served as associate director of the center from 2019-20. Sideris recently accepted a position in the Environment Studies Program at University of California, Santa Barbara.
Carter joined IU Bloomington in 2018 and is affiliated with the College of Arts and Sciences’ Departments of English and of African American and African Diaspora Studies as well as the Department of Religious Studies. An expert in the intersections of Blackness with religion, theology, ecology, and American culture, Carter is the author of Race: A Theological Account and the forthcoming The Religion of Whiteness: An Apocalyptic Lyric. The Religion of Whiteness is the first in a three-volume work that theorizes Black religion transnationally.
The Center for Religion and the Human was founded at IU Bloomington in 2019 to promote interdisciplinary and public-facing scholarship on religion. Carter’s appointment expands the center’s intellectual reach, according to Sullivan.
"Recently, the center has taken up challenges of earth, social, and political justice by attending to race and anti-Black violence," Sullivan said. "A focus on Black religion will enhance our capacity for rethinking the human, rethinking justice, and ultimately rethinking the world otherwise.
“I am thrilled to be joined in the directorship of the center by my colleague Jay Carter,” Sullivan continued. “We have great plans for expanding the center’s projects and events."
The Center for Religion and the Human is supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and IU Bloomington’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research.
