William Underwood studies modern religious thought and its relationship with philosophy and critical theory, using the European and U.S. discourse on religion as a lens for understanding the intellectual and political formation of Western modernity. His research explores how distinctively modern forms of philosophical reason, including Marxism, phenomenology, and deconstruction, articulate themselves in relation to religion, and the institutional forms that concretize that difference.
His current book project, The Antitheses of Religion: Marx, Materialism, and the Making of American Religious Studies, critically interrogates the material turn in the study of religion through a genealogy of the category of materiality in the field’s U.S. history, and constructs a novel materialist approach on the basis of an overdue encounter between religious studies and the Marxist theoretical tradition. Beyond this work, his research interests include religion in the Americas, theory and method in the study of religion, material religion, and political theory and social ethics.
William’s writing is forthcoming in The Journal of Religion and the edited American Examples, Volume 4: New Conversations About Religion.
Fall 2024
Is Another World Possible? Utopianism and its Discontents — FYSP 174
Religion, Reason, and Empire — RELG 290
Spring 2025
Religion and Social Change — RELG 191
Religion and Abolition: from Slavery to the Prison-Industrial-Complex — RELG 293
