Darrius D. Hills to Receive $2,850 Grant with the NEH Summer Institute
Darrius D. Hills, associate professor of religious studies, has been accepted to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute for June 2023. Hosted by the University of Virginia, Hills will participate in a three-week residential institute named “Revisiting Religion and Place in Light of Environmental, Legal, and Indigenous Studies.” Hosted by the NEH and the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab (RRD), the Institute will host 26 faculty and advanced graduate students in religious studies and related fields from across the United States for an immersive exploration of critical new perspectives on the theme of “place.” NEH Summer Institutes and Seminars allow faculty members to spend 2-4 weeks in a community with other scholars.
“I am excited to have the opportunity to strengthen my research and teaching competencies in the broad field of religious scholarship offered by the summer institute,” Hills states. “The localized, immersion-based foci of the program will assist my understanding of how varied communities create and reinforce identity through the setting aside of particular spaces and through the physical and discursive transformation of those spaces into sites of ultimate meaning.”
The Institute will enhance Hills’s teaching on the themes of religion and race in courses such as his seminar, “Religion, Race, and American Evangelicalism,” and help him launch his second book project, which will address contemporary iterations of muscular Christianity. Hills received his M.Div. from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion (with a concentration in African American Religion) from Rice University. His research interests privilege African American religious thought, liberation theologies, womanist religious thought, Black male studies, and religion and culture.
The NEH seeks to introduce scholars like Hills in religious studies and related fields to the enormously productive rethinking of the idea of “place” that has occurred across disciplines in recent years. In addition, scholars will be encouraged to adopt new methods of thinking, utilize critical pedagogical practices to strengthen teaching and research, and engage in close reading and discussion of crucial contemporary scholarship on the study of place. These discussions will be complemented by conversations with noted experts and pedagogy workshops primarily driven by participants’ research and teaching aims. Scholars will also participate in field-based engagements at local sites representing rich and relevant themes explored throughout the Institute.
About the Religion, Race, and Democracy Lab
The RRD is led by co-directors Professors Martien Halvorson-Taylor and Kurtis Schaeffer. The RDD seeks to explore the complex relationship between religion, race, and democracy on local, national, and global levels, while simultaneously examining the past and present.