Manuel Vasquez


Manuel A. Vasquez is a prominent Salvadoran scholar of religion and society. As Andrew W. Mellon post-doctoral fellow at Wesleyan University's Center for the Americas and former faculty at the University of Florida, he has focused on the interplay between religion and globalization in the Americas, particularly in Latin America and among U.S. Latinos.

Biography

Manuel A. Vásquez received his B.S. from Georgetown University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Temple University. Vasquez's dissertation and first book, The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity, focused on the impact of neo-liberal capitalism on grassroots progressive Catholicism in Brazil. The book received the 1998 award for excellence in the analytical-descriptive study of religion from the American Academy of Religion. More recently, Vasquez has co-directed a series of studies, supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Ford Foundation, on the role of religion in the process of migration, settlement, and integration among Latinos in new destinations in the U.S. South. In particular, he has explored how religious congregations grapple with the challenges posed by increasing racial and ethnic diversity and transnational immigration, both authorized and unauthorized. Vasquez has also contributed to the field of method and theory, advancing a "non-reductive materialism" that stresses the centrality of embodiment, emplacement, practice, and material culture in the study of religion. He argues that religions are hybrid and dynamic artifacts produced by complex relations among discursive matrices, and social, neural, and ecological networks.
In 2016, Vásquez pleaded no contest to video voyeurism for, according to an Alachua County Sheriff’s Office arrest report, secretly recording a teenage relative by placing a recording device in her closet. He subsequently resigned from his post as chair of the department of religion at the University of Florida.

Works

  • "The Persistence, Ubiquity, and Dynamicity of Materiality: Studying Religion and Materiality Comparatively," in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Materiality, edited by V. Narayanan, 4-80.
  • The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions , with a revised and updated edition in Portuguese by Ideias e Letras
  • Living "Illegal:" The Human Face of Unauthorized Immigration , with a second, updated edition
  • More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion
  • A Place to Be: Brazilian, Guatemalan, and Mexican Immigrants in Florida's New Destinations
  • Latin American Religions: Histories and Documents in Context
  • Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America
  • Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas
  • Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas
  • The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity