Biography
Whitney Bauman is Professor and Chair Elect of Religious Studies at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, FL. He is also co-founder and co-director of Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, a non-profit that holds public discussions over social and ecological issues related to globalization and climate change. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and a Humboldt Fellowship, and President Elect of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. His publications include: Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (CUP 2014); co-editor with Karen Bray and Heather Eaton of Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking (FUP 2023); and Religion, Decolonization, and the Planetary Community: Voices from the Indonesian Archipelago, co-edited with Samsul Maarif and Jonathan Smith (Routledge, 2026). His most recent book is: Critical Planetary Romanticism: Religious and Scientific Sources for a New Materialism (CUP 2026).
Candidate Statement
We are all familiar with the problems that increasingly face the humanities in higher education, and especially for theology and religious studies. When I began teaching in 2008, my classes provided a space for critical and difficult conversations with students. While this hasn’t totally disappeared, many students are afraid to speak up in classes because they are afraid of the response from those who are on the other side of issues from them, and many more people in our profession face job insecurity due to infringements upon our academic freedoms and freedom of speech. I think religious studies and theology departments at colleges, seminaries and universities can play critical and constructive roles in working through these challenges, and the AAR as our professional organization can help fight for the spaces we and our students desperately need in order to do so.
The AAR provides us with the organizational space to work together and figure out what the future of religion and theology within the humanities and the wider academic and public worlds might look like. The AAR is our organizational space for deciding what our professional lives might look like in academic and public worlds that are rapidly changing. Finally, the AAR is our organizational space for supporting the development and growth of emerging scholars in new and different ways as the study and significance of religion shifts. I have been involved in the AAR since I was a recently graduated MTS student at Vanderbilt Divinity School in 2000. I first served as the grad student representative on the board when I was working on my PhD at the Graduate Theological Union. I have served on the Program Committee as a member, and then again more recently as Chair of the Program Committee and Board Member. I also serve on the editorial board of the JAAR and have been co-chair of both the “religion and ecology” and “science, technology and religion” units. Our organization and the work we do together are essential to the future of our fields, our professional lives, and to the future of higher education. I would be honored to serve you as Secretary of the AAR as we navigate these uncertainties together in the coming years.