Faculty

"I study religion primarily as a social phenomenon, especially as communicated through cultural products of literature, film, and other media. I am particularly interested in the speculative potential of science fiction in exploring religious meaning. I bring a postcolonial perspective to my work that I have applied most recently in articles on representations of religion in postcolonial science fiction. My other current research interests include religious themes in Japanese film, twentieth-century feminist explorations of mysticism, world Christianity (with an emphasis on Burma), and peace studies."

"My research focuses on marriage in Minnesota before 1850, particularly as a means of understanding gender, sexuality, race and nation-building in the region. Marriages of all kinds, and the households that marriages created, were inextricably bound up with questions of nation and identity for the Dakota, the Ojibwe, mixed-heritage individuals, and Americans who interacted in the Upper Midwest. Through the stories of married - and divorcing - men and women in the region, we can trace the uneven fortunes of American expansion in the early nineteenth century, and the nation-shaping power of marital acts."

"I have always been fascinated with the way culture and social organization affect our personal experience of the world. How do the ideas, social arrangements, and structures of power that we happen to have grown up with affect our sense of who we are and what's important? In my research and writing, I try to examine and render visible the contingent relationships between these factors and their significance for people's everyday lives. These were some of the themes I explored in my book, Imagining the Course of Life, which looks at how people's ideas about human development are connected to cultural constructions of self and personhood."

"I'm currently working on a manuscript of poems entitled Mother Lode, about copper mining in Arizona. I'm also working on superstition in nineteenth-century British Romanticism, a project that has led me to look at the tragic dramas of William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley."

"My research focuses on changing American roles in the new world order. The U.S. faces a dilemma as a single superpower in a chaotic multipolar world. It must choose between interventionism (philosophically or security driven) and isolationism (similarly motivated). I discuss these choices and their possible ramifications in my current writings. I also study the rise of Christian fundamentalism as a political and social movement in the U.S."

"For many years my research has focused on the Christian right. After writing a book on the Christian right and the Republican party, I shifted my focus to the Christian right's global activism. I am currently beginning a very different project: a study of how Midwestern cities are responding to the social and economic challenges posed by globalization."

Judith Thorn's general interests include signal transduction, the cytoskeleton, endocytosis, cell movements, development, dog behavior and training, and animal assisted therapy.