About

Ph.D., M.A., University of Chicago; B.A., Davidson College

Lisa Landoe Hedrick (she/her) joins Bates College as Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in American Religions/Religion in the Americas. After receiving her PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago in 2019, she was Teaching Fellow (2019–2021) in the Divinity School and the College, offering courses in Religious Studies, Anthropology, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Between 2021 and 2024, she was Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago, teaching critical social theory. Her past courses include: “Self, Culture, and Society,” “Religion and Its Other: Secular and Post-Secular Formations,” “Theology without ‘God’,” “Meaning and the Body,” and “Philosophical Problems of God-Talk.” Her first book—Whitehead and the Pittsburgh School: Preempting the Problem of Intentionality  (Rowman & Littlefield 2021)—is a historical and philosophical intervention to the problem of mind and world in Analytic philosophy of language. Her second book project concerns methodological reform in the academic study of religion as a constructive response to critical social theories (e.g., poststructural, feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, and post-/a-secular) of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. She has published articles related to this project in The Journal of Religion, Contemporary Pragmatism, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and The Journal of the American Academy of Religion (forthcoming), and also contributed a related chapter to Diversifying the Philosophy of Religion: Critiques, Methods, and Case Studies (Bloomsbury 2023). Her earlier works in American pragmatism, process philosophy, metaphysics, and analytic philosophy of language may also be found in The Review of Metaphysics, Contemporary Pragmatism, The Pluralist, Process Studies, and The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, for which she serves as Reviews Editor.