Office Location:
Specialization:
Religious Studies
Education:
- Honors B.A. (Saint Anselm College, 2006) M.A. in Classics (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009)
- M.S. in Library and Information Science (Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011)
- M.A. in Religious Studies (University of California, Santa Barbara, 2013)
Bio:
Nathan Fredrickson is interested both in the way religions function as embodied systems of representations – with the attendant issues associated with encoding, transmitting, and translating information across boundaries – and in the way they organize and modulate social power – creating and contesting boundaries.
Research:
My main project is my dissertation on fictional religions in fantastical literature. I am working and later hope to publish on the spatial and material categories (including, especially, the sovereign) by means of which humans make the worlds they inhabit.
Research interests: Popular culture, Literature (especially science fiction and fantasy), New religious movements, Borderlands studies, Political theology, Pedagogy, and Cognitive science of religion.
Projects:
Relative to translation studies, I am working on a paper entitled, “Translating Ontologies: A Pyrrhonian Pragmatic Translation Theory and the Goal of Consilience.”
Publications:
- “Fictional Religions in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream: World-making, Metareflection, and the Critical Power of Humor” in Jennifer Page, ed., Shakespeare’s “Mortal Living Ghost(s)”: Supernatural Appropriations and Afterlives (Routledge, forthcoming)
Courses:
- RG ST 7 (Introduction to American Religion)
- RG ST 15 (Religion and Psychology)
- RG ST 190 NF (World Making: Religious, Fictional, Virtual)