M. Gail Hamner Associate Professor Office: 512 Hall of Languages Phone: 315-443-5716 mghamner@syr.edu

Professor Hamner (Ph.D., Duke University, 1997) specializes in religion and culture, with teaching interests in religion and film, Christianity and American culture, religion and literature, and feminist theory and the study of religion. Having completed a manuscript entitled American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy (to be published by Oxford University Press in 2002), she currently is working on two projects: (i) a book tentatively titled In Good Faith: Teaching Religion and Film Amid the Presumptions of Secularity, and (ii) a long-term project examining feminist and marxian theorists' use of love as the central force of their politics. Click here to view Professor Hamner's CV.

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Religion 326:  Religion and Film
Religion 600: Marx and Foucault
Religion 246: Religion and Popular Culture
Religion 291: Comparative Themes and Issues: Methodological Approaches to the Study of Religion
Religion 344: Feminist Theology
Religion 358: Critical Issues in Religious Thought: Critical Theory
Religion 358: Critical Issues in Religious Thought: Land
Religion 391: Advanced Religion Seminar
Religion 500: Confessions

Ph.D., Religion, Duke University, Durham, NC, 1997
M.T.S., Philosophical Theology, valedictorian, Boston University School of  Theology, Boston, MA, 1989
B.S., Biology, Duke University, Durham, NC, 1985

• 1998-present  Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, Syracuse University
  
• 1997-1998  Lecturer, Duke University, Religion Department

Publications:

Books:

American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy, Oxford University Press, 2003

Other Publications/Submissions:

• "Cultural Saints", in Luis León and Gary Laderman, eds., Religion and American Culture (Santa Barbara : ABC-CLIO, forthcoming)
• Book note on N.J. Allen, W.S.F. Pickering, and W. Watts Miller, ed.s, On Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Routledge, 1998), Religious Studies Review , July, 2000.
• “Works of Love: The Political Injunction to Love in Donna Haraway and Kaja Silverman” submitted to Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion , September, 2000.
• A Religious Genealogy of Pragmatism: Classical Pragmatism and America's Puritan Imaginary, Oxford University Press, under contract .

Papers And Presentations:

2001

• April 3, "Anger Disguised and Complex", Theta Chi Beta (Religion Honor Society) Annual Meeting, LeMoyne College, DeWitt

2000

• September 21-24, “Singularity is Collectivity, Or: How the Labor of the Multitude is the Work of Love,” Marxism 2000, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
• June 24, “The Work of Love in Luce Irigaray: Feminist Politics and the Strategy of Love,” Gendering Ethics/The Ethics of Gender Conference, University of Leeds, UK
• June 23, Invitd respondent to the session, “Images of the Self: Contemporary Sci-Fi TV/Cinema and the Deployment of Subjectivity,” The Third Annual Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, Birmingham University, UK
• April 7, “Apocalyptic Fear and Scientific Commonsense: A Ghost (Spirit) in the Machine,” AAR-EIR 2000, Syracuse University
• February 19, Respondent to the session, “Why Religious Studies?” Religious Studies and Cultural Engagement: First Annual Alumni and Graduate Student Conference, Syracuse University

1999

• November 22, “That Pesky ‘And': Studying Religion and Popular Culture”, American Academy of Religion, Boston, MA
• February 25, “The Work of Love in Luce Irigaray,” The Working Papers in Gender Studies Lecture Series, Syracuse University

1998

• October, “The Work of Love in Donna Haraway and Kaja Silverman,” given as the new faculty lecture, Department of Religion, Syracuse University

1995

• November, “The Sign of God in the Burning Bush: Peircean Pragmatism and Continental Postmodernism,” American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, PA

1994

• November, respondent to the Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Group, American Academy of Religion, Chicago, IL
• February 18-19, respondent to Hayden White, guest speaker of the Graduate Program in Religion, Duke University

1993

• April 29-30, respondent to Katie G. Cannon, guest speaker of the Graduate Program in Religion, Duke University
• March, “An Alternate Vision of Feminist Politics: Love and Aesthetics in Donna Haraway,” Pragmatism and the Politics of Culture: The Eighth Annual Comparative Literature Symposium , University of Tulsa
• March, “The Twos and Threes of Pragmatics: Deleuzian Dualities, Peircean Triads, and the Politics of the Inbetween,”
• The Second Interdisciplinary Colloquium: The Work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari , Duke University