Teaching and Studying the Americas: Cultural Influences from Colonialism to the Present

Anthony B. Pinn is the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies. Pinn is also the author/editor of twenty-four books, including Varieties of African American Religious Experience; The Black Church in the Post-Civil Rights Era; Why, Lord?: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology; and African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (Palgrave Macmillan). He is currently working on a book dealing with the aesthetics of black religious experience and a co-edited volume on theoretical and methodological considerations related to the study of religion in popular culture.

Caroline F. Levander is Carlson Professor in the Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Rice University. She is author or co-editor of several books, including Voices of the Nation: Women and Public Speech in Nineteenth-Century American Culture and Literature and Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Du Bois. She is currently writing two books: Where is American Literature? and Laying Claim: Imagining Empire on the U.S./Mexico Border.

Michael O. Emerson is the Allyn and Gladys Cline Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. He is the author or co-author of several books, including the award-winning Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America; People of the Dream: Multiracial Congregations in the United States; and Passing the Plate. He currently is conducting a study of immigrants and their civic involvement. His most recent books including Transcending Racial Barriers: Toward a Mutual Obligations Approach and Religion Matters: What Sociology Teaches Us about Religion in Our World.