Biography
Brian K. Pennington is Director of Elon University’s Center for the Study of Religion, Culture, and Society and Professor of Religious Studies. A historian of modern Hinduism, he is the author of Was Hinduism Invented?: Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford 2005), editor of Teaching Religion and Violence (Oxford 2012), and co-editor with Amy L. Allocco of Ritual Innovation: Strategic Interventions in South Asian Religion (SUNY 2018). He has written articles and book chapters contributing to the emerging field of Interreligious Studies. He serves as Area Advisor for Modern Hinduism for Oxford Bibliographies Online. He is co-author of the public scholarship Instagram blog, “The Other Border Crisis,” highlighting religious nationalism, Islam, and migration at the borderlands of the European Union.
Pennington has served three terms on the AAR’s Board of Directors, including as Regions Director and on its Executive Committee. He has chaired the Teaching and Learning Committee, served on the Nominations Committee and multiple task forces and ad hoc committees, and as President of the American Academy of Religion, Southeast. He chairs the Executive Committee of the Conference on the Study of Religions of India and served on the board of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies.
Candidate Statement
The AAR is in a moment of generational transition, and I am delighted that this ballot includes many of our colleagues who have cultivated a deep and textured understanding of the AAR through distinguished service. I have served the AAR in multiple capacities since the 1990s and I am keen that our leadership attend to a set of urgent issues that confront our professional society:
We must build for a future that looks quite different from the higher education environment that gave rise to the AAR. To that end, we are well positioned to take advantage of important opportunities. A new Executive Director with a fresh vision is looking to the board for seasoned guidance. The development of the robust, virtual meeting options that our post-pandemic milieu and diverse membership demands is underway.
At the same time, many of us, including me, are deeply concerned about the serious challenges we face. At an organizational level, AAR membership numbers are at a historical low. The purpose, character, and accessibility of our in-person Annual Meeting, the AAR’s largest source of revenue, are under appropriate scrutiny.
The AAR is smaller but more diverse than when I first joined, and our members have distinct professional needs they look to the AAR to address. Among us are graduate students anxious about employment prospects, part-time and contingent faculty intimately familiar with higher education’s deep labor problems, professionals working outside of academia, faculty at state institutions wrestling with political interference, and teachers at financially strapped institutions burdened by heavy teaching loads.
Our profession is beset by attacks unseen since the McCarthy era. The campaign to discredit higher education and impugn university faculty targets the study of religion with particular ferocity. Analytical methods that deconstruct race and gender and interpretive modes that complicate cherished national myths are essential to the teaching and scholarship of many of our members. The field employs these methods not because, as our critics maintain, we relish the destruction of what others hold sacred, but because the humanistic principles on which the university is founded demand it. Equality, dignity of persons, justice, free inquiry, freedom of conscience, and above all pursuit of truth—the kind of truth that data and rigorous analysis can establish—characterize the calling to which AAR members respond daily in their classrooms and in their scholarly explorations.
My understanding of and vision for the AAR is informed by three separate terms on the AAR’s Board of Directors and work in other roles. I participated in the revision of the bylaws that established our current governance structures in 2010. I served on the Task Force that authored the AAR’s Religious Literacy guidelines for undergraduate education. I have chaired the Teaching and Learning Committee, served on the Nominations Committee, and worked for many years on behalf of the AAR’s regional affiliates, which serve important roles for members at smaller institutions or employed in contingent roles. I would be honored to work alongside my colleagues to lead the AAR during this time of organizational transformation.