Profile
Brendan Thornton is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology in the final stages of writing his dissertation, Searching for Respect: The Cultural Politics of Evangelical Christianity in the Dominican Republic. His research is broadly concerned with questions of religion, identity and culture. Brendan conducted over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a poor urban barrio of Villa Altagracia, Dominican Republic, examining the everyday practices of Pentecostal community members and the ways in which they negotiate meaning, belonging, and moral authority in the context of religious heterodoxy and Catholic cultural supremacy. He is interested in the micro politics of belief and the role religious identity plays in the context of poor urban communities. His broad anthropological interests center on comparative religion, Christianities, and comparative Caribbean ethnology. While his dissertation focuses on evangelical Christianity, he is also interested in the growth and transformation of native Caribbean religions (such as Haitian vodou, santería, etc.) and in particular their relationship to Pentecostal expansion and related social movements. Brendan loves teaching and considers himself an enthusiastic teacher-scholar. He believes that the educational benefits of diversity begin in the classroom where a critical perspective on why, how, and to whom one teaches is essential for creating effective and liberating learning environments for all. To this end, Brendan considers his teaching to be as important as his scholarship in using anthropology to enrich human understanding and enliven possibility within human experience. Brendan is originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan and was graduated from Michigan State University in 2002.
