Bivins Receives Honors

The honors keep coming for Jason C. Bivins, Professor of Religious Studies at NC State. The College of Humanities and Social Sciences has named him the winner of its 2024-25 Outstanding Research, Scholarship, and Creativity Award. On top of this, the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz has awarded him a prestigious Obama Fellowship.

A specialist in religion and American culture, Bivins earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from Indiana University. He works mainly on the intersections between American religion, politics and culture since 1900. He is an innovative, publicly engaged, and extraordinarily productive scholar who has established an international reputation as a leader in his field.

Since joining the faculty at NC State in 2000, Bivins has published four major books, in which he engages deeply with an unusually broad range of issues concerning American religion, politics and culture: The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Anti-Liberalism and the Challenge to Postwar American Politics (UNC Press, 2003), Religion of Fear: The Politics of Horror in Conservative Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2008), Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Embattled America: The Rise of Anti-Politics and America’s Obsession with Religion (Oxford University Press, 2022).

His other scholarly publications include over twenty-five articles and chapters, and twenty book reviews and review essays. Bivins has also given over eighty scholarly presentations, including various named lectures, a keynote address, and a talk at the Smithsonian Institute.

Through the Obama Fellowship program, the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies invites outstanding international scholars to lecture and work at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Fellows spend a significant amount of time at the Obama Institute, usually between two and four weeks. They pursue their individual research but are also expected to participate in graduate teaching, as well as offer a public lecture and make themselves available to postgraduate students. The institute awards up to five fellowships each year.

Founded in 2017, the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies provides an interdisciplinary research platform for examining the role of the United States in a changing global world from the perspective of culture, history, literature, media, economics, law, religion, medicine, art, and music. Research at the Obama Institute is groundbreaking for its redefinition of area studies and cultural studies in the 21st century and addresses a gap in the research landscape by expanding American studies beyond the nation’s borders.