Justin Doran
Assistant Professor of Religion

- Office
- Munroe Hall 216
- Tel
- (802) 443-5405
- jmdoran@middlebury.edu
- Office Hours
- Spring 2025: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, 9am-10am
Professor Doran joined the department in 2018. He teaches courses on religion in the Americas as well as thematic courses on violence, capitalism, and theory in the study of religion. A specialist in modern Pentecostalism, his current research focuses on capitalism, demonology, and Christian prosperity movements in Brazil, Canada, and the southwestern United States. He received his PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
Courses Taught
FYSE 1221
American Kitsch
Course Description
American Kitsch
Kitsch is trash. Kitsch is the opposite of art. Kitsch is the mass-produced, cheap substitute for objects made in good taste. To study kitsch is to study the unspoken social boundaries created by a modern world transformed by industrial production. In this seminar we will explore the formation of taste through focused studies of kitschy things paired with readings from social theorists. Our studies will range from popular culture to politics and religion across several national contexts. Drawing on major comparisons between popular culture and religion in Brazil and the United States, we will develop tools to critically assess how judgments of taste are embedded in the intersecting systems of race, class, and gender. 3 hrs. sem.
Terms Taught
Requirements
INTD 0500
Upcoming
Independent Study
Course Description
Independent Study
Approval Required
Terms Taught
RELI 0170
Current
American Religion
Course Description
American Religion
In this course we will explore religion in the Americas with a focus on the United States. Relying on a metaphor from linguistics, we will trace how an American religious “grammar” emerged from colonial contact zones and then assess how capitalism, denominationalism, and secularism shaped that grammar during the ensuing centuries. Extending the metaphor, we will seek to understand how different actors “spoke” American religion to shape society, make sense of the world, and harness natural and supernatural power. We will cover American variations on the traditions of Buddhism, indigenous religion, Christianity, African diasporic religion, folk spirituality, and Islam. 3 hrs lect, 1 hr. disc.
Terms Taught
Requirements
RELI 0201
Religion and Violence
Course Description
Religion and Violence
“Religion and violence” exists at the knotty intersection between politics, identity, and culture. A critical understanding of how and why religion has been employed to explain or justify violence is essential to becoming a responsible citizen of the world. In this course we will explore the complex relationship between religion, political economy, and violence from a global perspective. Our goal will be to deconstruct popular preconceptions of religion and violence, locate the variety of social structures that induce violence, and to develop a critical apparatus for understanding what is at stake when religion and violence intersect. 3 hrs. lect./1 hr. disc
Terms Taught
Requirements
RELI 0271
Death in Latin America
Course Description
Death in Latin America
The refrain of colonialism in the Americas was death. In its wake, encounters with dying and the dead shaped national cultures and popular religiosities across the hemisphere. In this course we will explore the diversity of rituals, stories, and devotions surrounding death in Latin America. Through a careful reading of Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America, we will critically examine the geopolitical entity of Latin America in its historical context while learning how to write powerfully about its social and economic realities. We will cover death across secular and religious formations in Mexico, Haiti, Brazil, Guatemala, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. 3 hrs. lect/3 hrs. lab.
Terms Taught
Requirements
RELI 0273
Upcoming
Religion and Capitalism
Course Description
Religion and Capitalism
Joseph Schumpeter described capitalism as animated by a perennial gale of creative destruction. While he was referring to its capacity to create and destroy industries, capitalism has had the same effect on social worlds. From those tumultuous worlds, a diverse array of religious practices, beliefs, and sentiments have likewise flourished and decayed. This course explores the relationship between global capitalism and religion in the modern period. Anchored in a comparison between Brazil and the United States, we will explore how religious traditions have encountered the world transformed by capitalism as well as the religious dimensions of capitalism itself. 3 hours lect./disc.
Terms Taught
Requirements
RELI 0373
Current
Possessions
Course Description
Possessions: Theories of Power in American Religion
Upon reading Faust, Karl Marx concluded that Goethe’s wisdom was simple: “the extent of the power of money is the extent of my power.” Or, in other words: money represents the power to possess a thing and, in possessing it, to wield that thing’s power. Despite this connection made at the roots of Western theories of power, we do not typically regard our possession of private property as akin to the Devil’s possession of human bodies. In this seminar we will explore the rich and troubling overlaps between private property, demonic possessions, mediumship, and power in the Americas. 3 hrs. sem.
Terms Taught
Requirements
RELI 0393
Crossroads
Course Description
Crossroads: Religion and Race in the Americas
White rock musicians have traced the origins of their musical style to the Delta blues, fixating on a myth that a young, Black musician sold his soul at a southern crossroads to learn to play the guitar. This myth portrays the success of rock as having supernatural origins, while obscuring how the recording industry appropriated and commodified the art of Black Americans. In this seminar we explore the polysemous image of the “crossroads” as an entrée into the intersecting fields of comparative religion, humanistic economics, and critical race. We will rely on works by authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Toni Morrison to interrogate these fields while comparing the histories of the U.S. and Brazil. 3 hrs. sem
Terms Taught
Requirements
RELI 0400
Upcoming
Seminar: Study of Religion
Course Description
Methods in the Study of Religion
How do we think about religion? Is there a common way to talk about religion across cultural divides or should we simply concur that religion is like art, where “We can’t define it, but we know it when we see it? This course will take us through the basic twentieth and twenty-first century theories in the study of religion as “ways of perceiving” this most elusive of phenomena: anthropology, psychology, history, text, politics, philosophy, theology, experience. All of these ways of perceiving religion play a crucial role in the history of the field. We will end by thinking through recent issues in the study of religion–religion and politics, gender and sexuality, comparative and interfaith studies, and the authority of religious identity. Students will be asked to outline a single, compelling case study in religion, and each week they will apply the theorists we read to the details of their case. In applying theories about religion to real-life situations, students will become skillful practitioners of the art of interpreting religion. They will also develop their own approaches to the study of religion and be able to articulate that approach to a wider audience. (At least 3 courses in the study of religion or by waiver. Open only to juniors and seniors.) 3 hrs. sem.
Terms Taught
RELI 0500
Current
Upcoming
Independent Research
Course Description
Independent Research
(Approval Required)
Terms Taught
RELI 0700
Current
Upcoming
Senior Project in Religion
Course Description
Senior Project
(Approval Required)
Terms Taught
RELI 0701
Current
Upcoming
Senior Thesis in Religion
Course Description
Senior Research for Honors Candidates
Approval required
Terms Taught
RELI 1045
American Prosperity Religion
Course Description
#blessed: American Prosperity Religion
tfw the vending machine gives you two snacks instead of one #cookies #blessed. Critics allege that thinking God cares about your personal prosperity exposes the rotting core of American late capitalism. But American nationalism is also rooted in God’s providence. How should we grapple with this American ambivalence toward prosperity and religion? In this class, we will use critical media theory to understand how capitalism cultivates a diversity of religious attitudes toward prosperity. While our focus will be contemporary media from the anglophone United States, we will explore comparable instances from Brazil and other Latin American countries in translation.
Terms Taught
Requirements