About the Event
Join us for the first webinAAR in our 2026 Presidential WebinAAR Series highlighting The REL Toolbox (reltoolbox.ua.edu), a free online advocacy resource for religion departments and programs. The REL Toolbox is a new resource that includes brief entries, written by a variety of scholars on a number of topics of relevance to leading a department today, from budgets and mentoring graduate students to recruiting majors, managing external program reviews, and even merging a unit or reinventing a program.
This workshop will be a guided and interactive approach to examining a program’s strength, weaknesses, and possibilities. Participants will learn how to use the REL Toolbox to build up program resilience and tactically address challenges in HigherEd.
Sponsored by the AAR Academic Relation Committee.
Event Guidelines
Please note: AAR membership is not required to register for this event. In order to register, you will need to login or create an account if you don’t already have one. Creating an account is free, quick and easy and enables us to let you know about related upcoming events.
For assistance, please view our video walkthrough. You can adjust the playback speed on the video next to the closed caption icon. If you still have questions, please contact us.
Presenter
Richard Newton is associate professor and undergraduate director in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. Dr. Newton’s areas of interest include theory and method in the study of religion, African American history, the New Testament in Western imagination, American cultural politics, and pedagogy in religious studies. His research explores how people create “scriptures” and how those productions operate in the formation of identities and cultural boundaries.
Moderator
Laurel Schneider is the newly installed President of the American Academy of Religion for 2026. Dr. Schneider is Research Professor at Boston University. Trained at Harvard (MA, MDiv) and Vanderbilt (PhD), her research and teaching focuses on Christian queer, feminist, postcolonial, and liberation possibilities. An interest in Indigenous traditions of eastern North America has influenced her work and teaching.