Faculty

Gretchen Buggeln holds the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christianity and the Arts. She writes and teaches about the intersection of Christian belief and the material world. Her primary research interest is American sacred spaces, and she recently authored The Suburban Church: Modernism and Community in Postwar America, a book about the ubiquitous, modern-style, suburban church of the postwar era (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Her previous book, Temples of Grace: The Material Transformation of Connecticut’s Churches, 1790-1840 (2003) won national book awards from the Vernacular Architecture Forum and the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic.

Before coming to Valparaiso in 2004, Buggeln worked in the academic programs department of the H.F. du Pont Winterthur Museum in Delaware, and she continues to be active in the museum field by reviewing exhibitions and writing about how museums interpret religious artifacts and belief. She recently co-edited Religion in Museums: Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, with Crispin Paine and S. Brent Plate, a collection of essays about the interpretation of religious objects in museums (Bloomsbury, 2016). Buggeln serves on the board of the local Porter County Museum and enjoys teaching classes—such as “Museum History and Culture,” “The American Home,” and a freshman material culture writing workshop—that engage students with local museums, architecture, and artifact collections. She loves field trips!

Buggeln also coordinates the sophomore-level honors course “Word and Image” and teaches additional American studies upper-level seminars such as “American Consumer Culture.” She serves as director of the Valparaiso American Studies academic major and advisor to the Christ College student arts group.

From June 2015 to June 2017, Buggeln served as president of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, a professional organization dedicated to the appreciation and study of ordinary buildings and landscapes. This group of scholars and professionals models the concerns of Christ College: interdisciplinary thought and collaboration, and the application of humanities research and education to help individuals and communities flourish.

Prof. Buggeln holds a BA in history from Dartmouth College, an M.A. from the Winterthur Museum program at the University of Delaware, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University.

VAF link: vernaculararchitectureforum.org

The Suburban Church link: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-suburban-church

Temples of Grace link: http://www.amazon.com/Temples-Grace-Transformation-Connecticuts-1790-1840/dp/B006QS97YA

Religion in Museums link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/religion-in-museums-9781474255516/

Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard has been named to the Richard and Phyllis Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University, and has affiliated with Christ College as professor of history and the humanities. Alumni might remember him teaching as a Lilly Fellow on campus 1997-99. This fall he will teach a new CC seminar, “What Is the Good Life? Moral Inquiry before the Modern Age.”

Howard returns to Valparaiso from Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts, where he was associate professor of history. He was director of two distinctive programs at Gordon: the Jerusalem & Athens Forum, an honors program in the history of Christian thought and literature; and Critical Loyalty: Christian Vocation at Gordon College, a five-year project funded by the Lilly Endowment.

Professor Howard completed his MA (1992) and PhD (1996) at the University of Virginia, concentrating in modern European intellectual and religious history. He is the author of Religion and the Rise of Historicism (Cambridge, 2000) and Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University (Oxford, 2006). This summer, he and Mark A. Noll (University of Notre Dame) published an edited volume, entitled Protestantism after 500 Years (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Howard’s articles and reviews have appeared in journals including the American Historical Review, Church History, Journal of the History of Ideas, History of Universities, The National Interest, Modern Age, Christian Century, and Books & Culture. In 2003-04, he served as a Senior Carey Fellow in the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Currently he is working on a project entitled, “American Religion in the European Mind: Reflections on the Transatlantic Religious Divide.”

His wife, Agnes R. Howard, PhD, formerly assistant professor of history at Gordon College, and frequent contributor to The Cresset, Valparaiso University’s review of literature, the arts, and public affairs, will teach in the Christ College Freshman Program this fall.

PhD Religious Studies – Boston University
Mueller Hall Room LL21
219-464-5006
slavica.jakelic@valpo.edu
Jakelic CV

Slavica Jakelic is associate professor of humanities and social thought at Christ College, the honors college of Valparaiso University. Her scholarly interests and publications center on religion and collective identity, religious and secular humanisms, theories of religion and secularism, theories of modernity, nationalism and populism, interreligious dialogue, and conflict resolution. Before joining Christ College, Jakelić has worked at or been a fellow of a number of interdisciplinary institutes in Europe and the U.S.—the Erasmus Institute for the Culture of Democracy in Croatia, the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, Austria, the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame, the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago, the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, and the Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame’s Keough School. She is a Senior Fellow of the national project “Religion&Its Publics,” placed at the University of Virginia, where she was a faculty member and co-director at the UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture for several years. 

Jakelić is a co-editor of two volumes, The Future of the Study of Religion and Crossing Boundaries: From Syria to Slovakia, a co-editor of The Hedgehog Review’s issue “After Secularization,” and, most recently, the author of Collectivistic Religions: Religion, Choice, and Identity in Late Modernity. She is currently working on a book entitled Chastening Religious and Secular Humanisms: Identity, Solidarity, and the Practice of Pluralism.

PhD History – Stanford University
Linwood House Room B7
219-464-5025
mel.piehl@valpo.edu

Mel Piehl received his BA from Valparaiso University and his PhD from Stanford University. His scholarly interests center on American intellectual and religious history, with particular attention to American Catholic history and the relations between religion and social thought. Piehl’s book Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America was a finalist for the Robert Kennedy National Book Award; a new edition of the book was published in 2007. He is co-author of an American history text, The Brief American Pageant. His writings on American Catholicism have appeared in a number of books and journals. Piehl served as the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Dayton in 2001-2002. He has most recently published articles on religion and American intellectual life in the twentieth century. He served as the fourth dean of Christ College from 2003 to 2013. He was the Visiting Scholar in Catholic Studies at Seattle University in 2013-2014 before returning to teach at Christ College.

Jennifer Prough received her BA from Valparaiso University and her PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University. Her teaching and research interests include the anthropology of media, anthropology of tourism, Japanese studies, gender studies, and globalization. At the heart of Prough’s research and teaching interests are issues of representation and the ways that cultural meanings are produced and managed, experienced and interpreted through mass culture.  Her book entitled, “Straight from the Heart: Gender, intimacy, and the Cultural Production of Shōjo Manga” (University of Hawai’i Press, 2011) examines the production of Girls’ comics in Japan through ethnographic analysis. Her current research project seeks to understand the ways that tradition, history, and culture are produced, packaged, promoted, and consumed in the Kyoto tourist industry. Through ethnographic analysis, in this manuscript Prough analyzes the ways that history and culture are deployed to create an atmosphere both ancient and modern, marketing Kyoto as a quintessential Japanese destination for both national and international tourists.

In addition to teaching in the Freshman Program and “Interpretations: Self, Culture, Society,” Prough teaches seminars on East Asian Media and Culture, Urban Japan, Japanese visual culture, tourism, and anthropology. Besides her work in Christ College, she teaches in the Chinese and Japanese Studies program.

PhD Religious Studies – University of Virginia
Mueller Hall Room 126
219-464-6386
Matthew.Puffer@valpo.edu
Puffer – CV

Matthew Puffer received a BS in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina State University, an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary, and his PhD in Religious Studies (Theology, Ethics, and Culture) from the University of Virginia. Prior to joining the Christ College faculty he was a Catherine of Siena Fellow in the Ethics Program at Villanova University and a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching explore competing normative visions of the human person, especially rival versions of the imago dei and human dignity and their implications for issues in biomedical, economic, environmental, and war and peace ethics. He is currently working on a monograph that examines Augustine’s understanding of the imago dei as it develops across a half-century of letters, sermons, and treatises. Puffer co-edited Comparative Religious Ethics: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies and has published in Modern Theology, the International Journal of Systematic Theology, the Journal of Religious Ethics, the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and in edited volumes.

Mark Schwehn received his BA from Valparaiso University, and his PhD in history and humanities from Stanford University. He has written widely about Henry Adams and William James, including, with other scholars, A William James Renaissance (1982). He has also written essays on the poetry of Robert Frost, film criticism, history, cognitive theory, and human sexuality. He has published widely on religion and higher learning, including Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (1993) and Everyone A Teacher (2000). With Dorothy Bass he is editor of Leading Lives That Matter: What We Should Do and Who We Should Be (2006). In 2005-2006 and again in 2014-2015 he was a Fellow at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Studies at St. John’s University (MN). Schwehn is Founding Project Director of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts at Valparaiso, and serves on the boards of several major institutions addressing religion, education, and American public life. He served as provost from 2009-2014.

Baylor University
Mueller Hall 130
219-464-6766
julien.smith@valpo.edu

Smith CV

Office Hours

Julien Smith received his BA from the University of California at Berkeley in French and Slavic Languages and Literature, an MA in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary, and a PhD in Religion from Baylor University. His scholarly interests center on Biblical texts and traditions. He has written and presented papers on a variety of New Testament and apocryphal subjects and texts, including Ephesians, Acts, Galatians, and IV Maccabees. Recent projects also include articles on church-related higher education, the interpretation of Scripture in the Epistle of Barnabas, and the portrayal of Jews in the writing of the Catholic novelist Walker Percy. His first book is entitled Christ the Ideal King: Cultural Context, Rhetorical Strategy, and the Power of Divine Monarchy in Ephesians, published by Mohr Siebeck in 2011. In addition to teaching in the CC Freshman Program, he teaches The Christian Tradition and seminars on Jesus and Paul. His next writing project focuses on the Apostle Paul’s royal Christology.

Edward Upton received a BA in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University and his PhD in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago, where he also taught in the Humanities Common Core and in the university’s writing program. His research centers on T.S. Eliot’s poetic engagement with sources from ancient India, especially in The Waste Land. His interests include modern poetry, hermeneutics, literary criticism, the history of orientalism, the history of religions, and modern theology. He has lectured on Eliot’s poetry at Oriel College, Oxford University. He teaches courses on “Theology and Literature”, “The Devil and the Problem of Evil,” “Western Mysticism and the Interpretation of India,” and “Religion and Contemporary Global Literature,” in addition to teaching in the CC Freshman Program.

David Western received his BA in Political Science from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and his PhD in Political Science from Brown University. His work focuses on social and political theory, international relations, peace studies and conflict resolution especially addressing the role that empathy ought to play in making and maintaining peace in the world. Western previously taught at Grinnell College, where he was the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies. At Brown University he was awarded the P. Terrence Hopmann Award for Teaching Excellence. Western is currently turning his dissertation – “Power, Justice, Empathy: How and Why Empathy Matters for Peace” – into a book manuscript. He teaches seminars on “King and Gandhi”, “Justice” and “Human Rights: Politics, Ethics, Law” as well as the CC Freshman Program and “Interpretation: Self, Culture and Society”.