Mark Juergensmeyer

MARK JUERGENSMEYER is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Global studies, founding director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, and affiliate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published approximately three hundred articles and thirty books. JUERGENSMEYER'S latest book is God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2020). He has also recently published God in the Tumult of the Global Square: Religion in Global Civil Society (co-author with Dinah Griego and John Soboslai, University of California Press, 2015). A previous book, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (University of California Press, 2008) covers the rise of religious activism from al Qaeda to the Christian militia, and explores its confrontation with secular modernity. It is based on his earlier book, The New Cold War? named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. The fourth edition of his widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press) was published in 2017; like the earlier editions, it is based on interviews with religious activists around the world in every religious tradition--including victims of ISIS, anti-Muslim Buddhist activists, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States--and was listed by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. His book on Gandhian conflict resolution has been reprinted as Gandhi's Way (University of California Press, Updated Edition, 2005), and was selected as Community Book of the Year at the University of California, Davis. He has edited The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions (Oxford University Press 2006), Religion in Global Civil Society (Oxford University Press 2005), and co-edited with Saskia Sassen and Manfred Steger the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Studies (Oxford University Press 2017). He has co-edited two encyclopedias--one on global religion and the other on global studies--as well as the Princeton Readings in Religion and Violence, and the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence. JUERGENSMEYER has received research fellowships from the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the 2003 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for contributions to the study of religion, and is the 2004 recipient of the Silver Award of the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Spain. He received Honorary Doctorates from Lehigh University in 2004 and Roskilde University in Denmark in 2009. He has also received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006, and the Unitas Distinguished Alumnus Award from Union Theological Seminary, New York City, in 2007. He was elected president of the American Academy of Religion, and chaired the working group on Religion and International Affairs for the national Social Science Research Council which resulted in the co-edited book (with Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen), Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press). He has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including CNN, BBC, and NPR.