DeAnna Daniels, an Assistant Professor of Africana and Religious Studies, has been selected as one of 10 participants in the prestigious 2026-2028 Young Scholars in American Religion Program.
Daniels is the third faculty member from the University of Arizona’s Department of Religious Studies and Classics selected for the program, following Kristy Slominski in 2022 and Daisy Vargas in 2019.
“Being accepted into the Young Scholars of American Religion program is a tremendous honor and a meaningful recognition of the questions and ideas that have shaped my work. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn and collaborate with an extraordinary community and cohort of scholars and to continue exploring the complex ways religion shapes—and is shaped by—American life,” Daniels said.
The program will allow Daniels, who joined the College of Humanities faculty in 2023, to complete her current project, “Thinking through the Slash: Horror’s Entanglement with Black Religious Thought and Culture,” which investigates the cultural, social and aesthetic dimensions of Black religious experience through attention and theorization of the relationship between religion, race, gender, disability and horror in literature, visual culture and film.
The Young Scholars in American Religion Program, at the Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture at IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, is a highly competitive early-career scholar award. With support from Lilly Endowment, the Center assists these early career scholars in the improvement of their teaching and research and in the development of professional communities.