Dr. Donovan Schaefer

Biography

Donovan Schaefer joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 after spending years as a lecturer at the University of Oxford. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in an interdisciplinary Religion, Literature, and Arts program from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, as well as Master's and Doctoral degrees in Religion from Syracuse University. His research primarily focuses on the role of embodiment and feeling within the intersections of religion, science, and material culture, particularly in examining the formations of the secular. His book, "Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, Power" (Duke, 2015), challenged the idea that religion is inextricably linked to language and belief, instead proposing that it is primarily driven by affects. This was followed by "Evolution Affect Theory: Humanities, Sciences, Study of Power" (Cambridge, 2019), which explored the history of engagement with affect theory in the life sciences. His recent work, "Wild Experiment: Feeling Science Secularism Darwin" (Duke, 2022), investigates the intersections of affect theory, science, and critical approaches to the secular, and won the 2023 Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) and the International Society for Science and Religion book prize. He is also a member of the secondary faculty at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Core Faculty for the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program, as well as a member of the graduate group in Comparative Literature.

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