Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty

Bradford Verter

Departmentally Affiliated Historian-In-Residence (2008)
B.A. Columbia University, M.A. Princeton University, Ph.D. Princeton University

With degrees from Columbia and Princeton Universities, Bradford Verter is interested in American cultural history, and in theoretical and methodological issues in the study of religion. He has been a fellow of the Warburg Institute, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and has held positions at Princeton, Amherst, Williams, Bennington, Boston University, and New York University.

Verter's articles on the work of the contemporary theorist Pierre Bourdieu and on various aspects of the ideological and social formation of popular religious discourse in the United States have appeared in Sociological Theory, Journal of Urban History, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Harvard Theological Review, The Spectator, and other publications.

He is the general editor of the series Subterranean Lives: Chronicles of Alternative America (Rutgers University Press, 2006–2008; Duke University Press, 2009), which reprints autobiographical accounts by members of marginalized subcultures. With Johannes Wolfart, he is the co-editor of Rethinking Religion 101: Critical Issues in Religious Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and a four-volume collection on Religion and Violence (Routledge Press, 2010). He is currently completing a study of magical practice since the Enlightenment titled Dark Star Rising: The Emergence of Modern Occultism.