The American Academy of Religion is pleased to announce the winner of the 2024 Katie Geneva Cannon Excellence in Teaching Award: Sheila F. Winborne. The award is given annually to an individual who demonstrates excellence in the teaching of religion in higher education.
Dr. Winborne is teaching professor in the department of philosophy and religion at Northeastern University in Boston. A professor at Northeastern since 2011, she takes an interdisciplinary approach in the studies of religion, philosophy, race, and film. Her research involves analysis of visual culture of the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. This includes exploring how visual culture reflects and influences community beliefs and practices, and how artists use forms of spiritual and prophetic language to describe their purposes. In particular, she embraces what she refers to as a pedagogy of “the Other” and the impact of human tragedy on contemporary ways of believing and acting. In this engagement, she utilizes a pluralistic religious studies framework to ensure a diversity of source material and perspectives.
Professor Winborne has practical creative experiences in each of the media about which she teaches and does research. Her most popular courses at Northeastern include “Apocalypticism in Film,” “The Problem of Evil in Film,” and “Science Fiction and Film: Moral Dilemmas and Ethical Analysis.”
Dr. Winborne received her PhD in the study of religion from Harvard University (specialization theology and the visual arts), an MTS (concentration religion and culture) from Harvard Divinity School, an MA in the humanities (concentration philosophy and art) from Old Dominion University, and a BA (studio art major, philosophy minor) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
In addition to the American Academy of Religion, Sheila is also an active member in the Society of the Arts in Religious and Theological Studies, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Society of the Study of Black Religion, and The Dark Room: Race and Visual Culture Studies Group.
Join us this July when Professor Winborne leads a pedagogy workshop as part of the new WebinAAR program.
With gratitude for her ongoing commitment to the teaching of religion, AAR’s Committee on Teaching and Learning unanimously voted to name Dr. Winborne as this year’s Teaching Award winner.
We look forward to celebrating Dr. Winborne at the 2024 Annual Meeting. Learn more about her teaching philosophy in her teaching statement.