Brief bio sketch.
After finishing the graduate program in History of Religions at the University of
Chicago, I started out teaching and publishing at Princeton University in two different but
related fields. The first was the field African traditional religions, in which I pursued an
anthropological fieldwork approach. The second was the sub-discipline of comparative
religions, in which I focused on issues in theory and method. In addition to doing
periodic fieldwork in central Uganda and southwestern Nigeria, I wrote on issues
involved in the study of myth and ritual among non-literate and pre-historic societies. I
wrote a classroom textbook on African religions, which, after 20 years, is now in its
second revised edition. At the University of Virginia I continued in the same mode, and
published a monograph on the myth and ritual aspects of the ancient kingdom of
Buganda. Then followed an edited collection of essays on issues in the contemporary
study of comparative religions, in response to the critiques of postmodernism.
An important turning point in the classroom was a UVA grant to create a new
undergraduate course that utilized technology in the classroom. For this purpose I
developed a new course on African traditional art, using a large collection of digital
images of African art objects supplied by the Fowler Collection of African art at UCLA
in collaboration with the Getty Museum. With these images, students in this class
designed and created their own exhibitions of African art for presentation on the Web
incorporating the results of classroom lectures and library research. This course has
become one of the models at the University of Virginia for using digital technology in the
classroom, transforming the classroom experience into a student oriented, collaborative
learning, and project focused environment.
In the course of teaching annual Senior Seminars in the Department of Religious
Studies on various subjects that are chosen from outside the instructors’ usual course
offerings, I selected the subject of the Salem witch trials for one of the semester classes. I
wanted students to grapple with a range of interpretative approaches that have been
applied to this subject -- the many psychological, theological sociological, and
economic, interpretations. More importantly, I wanted students to grapple with the
primary sources themselves, to learn about the social and religious context, to hear the
“voices” of the people in the court records, like a field anthropologist, and to grasp how
the witchcraft episode was experienced on the ground, so to speak, in the words of the
participants. I also wanted students to learn good historical method, engage in critical
thinking, and develop their own perspective. In 1999 I received a small grant to create an
electronic edition of the out-of-print three volumes of court records, the Salem Witchcraft
Papers, and put them online in searchable form. Next came the discovery of my own
ancestors involvement (as defenders of Rebecca Nurse) which both spurred my interest
and led me to take great care in imposing conventional interpretations on this complex
subject.
The Salem seminar was such a success that I wanted to place more primary source
documents online and develop some digital tools for scholarly research. This led to
participation in University of Virginia’s renowned Institute of Advanced Technology in
the Humanities (IATH) and then to a large NEH grant to digitize more primary source
material, to create interactive historical maps, and to join together with other scholars in
the enormously complicated task of creating a new transcription of all the original
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manuscript records. The result was the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and
Transcription Project.
In 1999 the instructional and research potential of the Internet was just being
discovered , and I in turn was discovering how the Salem Archive , as well as the
digitized version of my African art class, was transforming my own teaching and
research. The University of Virginia supported my classroom efforts by putting laptops
in the hands of all my students in the Salem seminar, filling them with electronic texts,
giving me a wireless classroom. This resulted in changing my seminar into a
collaborative laboratory for digital history, in which students used a large number digital
and library resources to write their own, original biographical profiles of important
people involved in the Salem witch trials, the best of which I placed in the Salem Archive.
In this setting, students were able to “become their own historians,” as one student put it,
fully informed about current scholarly work and steeped in the original sources. Creating
the Salem Archive has also opened up a wider collaborative world of scholarship to me,
from 17th historical linguists, to historical geographers, to database programmers, and
New England archivists and historians. My classroom is also no longer confined to the
buildings and grounds of the University of Virginia. During the academic year, I respond
to dozens of emails from both teachers and students using the Salem Archive, and from
scholars who are using it in their research. Instead of presenting papers only to the
annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion, I find myself giving papers to
the American Historical Association, Social Science History Association, Geography
conferences, Early American History meetings, American Anthropological, and digital
scholarship conferences.
As a result of the Salem Archive and Fellowship at IATH, my recent academic
biography, then, has undergone significant transformation in both teaching and
scholarship. But it has also remained consistently grounded in primary source work
focused on small scale communities and the intersection of their theology and social life
in historical perspective, both in my research and teaching.