Faculty
Manuel A. Vásquez
Professor
Neikirk Term Professor (2002-03)
UF Research Foundation Professor (2004-2006)
Religions of Latin America and among U.S. Latinos, Method and Theory, Religion and Globalization
Office: 107B Anderson Hall
Phone: (352) 392-1625
Email: manuelv@ufl.edu
Manuel A. Vásquez received his B.S. from Georgetown University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Temple University. He has been an Andrew W. Mellon fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Americas. His area of expertise is the intersection of religion, immigration, and globalization in the Americas. He is also developing a comparative focus on contemporary transnational Latin American and African religious networks. In addition, he is interested in method and theory in the study of religion, particularly in issues connected with embodiment, material culture, practice, place-making, and mobility (physical and virtual).
Vásquez is the author of More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford, 2011) and The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge, 1998). He also co-authored Living ‘Illegal’: The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration (New Press, 2011) and Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas (Rutgers, 2003) and. Moreover, he has published a number of co-edited volumes, including A Place to Be: Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican Immigrants in Florida’s New Destinations (Rutgers, 2009), Latin American Religions: Histories and Documents in Context (NYU, 2008), and Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America. (AltaMira, 2005).
Currently, Vásquez is working with anthropologist Christina Rocha (Center for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney) on an edited volume on the global spread of religions originating in Brazil. He is also collaborating with Vasudha Narayanan on a companion to the study of religion and materiality.
