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WORK TITLE: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theory
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http://indiana.edu/~relstud/people/profiles/harriss_cooper * http://indiana.edu/~relstud/assets/docs/harriss_cv_2-21-17.pdf
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Washington and Lee University, B.A., 1997; University of Chicago, A.M., 1998, Ph.D., 2011; Yale Divinity School, M.A.R., 2003.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, instructor, 2008-09; Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, visiting assistant professor of race and religion, 2010-12; University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, postdoctoral associate, 2012-14; Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, assistant professor of religious studies, 2014—, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, adjunct professor.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including The Obama Effect: Multidisciplinary Renderings of the 2008 Presidential Campaign, edited by Heather Harris, Kimberly Moffitt, and Catherine Squires, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2010, and Race and Secularism in America, edited by Jonathon Kahn and Vincent Lloyd, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2016. Contributor of articles and reviews to professional journals and other periodicals, including African American Review, Biblical Interpretation, Callaloo, Journal of Africana Religions, Journal of Religion, Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas, and Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
M. Cooper Harriss is assistant professor of religious studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His “research and teaching,” the author declared in an autobiographical statement appearing on the Indiana University Bloomington website, “dwell critically upon historical texts (including literature, vernacular music, preaching, and performance) to discern ways in which religious thought, belief, and practice both contribute to and are generated by the formation of diverse American cultures and identities.” “I am particularly interested,” Harriss continued, “in the religious and theological dimensions of the concept of race, tracing various critical religious terms of its development and cultural expression in American, African-American, and transnational contexts.” He is the author of the monograph Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology, a study of the religious aspects of the famous African American novelist’s work.
Harriss suggests that Ellison’s first novel serves as a bridge between works from the Harlem Renaissance of the early twentieth century to the more militant works of the middle and late twentieth century. He also suggests that Ellison’s work has depths that reflect his personal theology—but one that is hidden and must be extracted from the work by careful reading. “Against reductive tendencies of materialist and secular accounts of racial identity, Harriss argues that Ellison’s understanding of race—characterized as an invisible theology in a secular age—makes possible a reconsideration of the relation between race, religion, and secularism,” stated Tyler Davis in Reading Religion. “Harriss’s second and more basic argument … is that Ellison’s writings structurally procure an invisible theology, or a religiously-charged notion of racial life underscored by ambiguity and indeterminacy, which Harriss culls from Ellison’s relentless examination of the tensions between multiple forms of identity.”
Critics found Harriss’s monograph an instructive and innovative approach to a work and an author considered foundational to modern African American literature. “One of the most valuable and sensitively presented aspects of M. Cooper Harriss’s new book is its attempt to account for why Ellison, after the success of his first novel, Invisible Man, struggled so mightily, and ultimately failed, to finish his second novel,” wrote David M. Wilmington in the Christian Century. “Harriss’s book is an impressive accomplishment reflecting careful thought, patient research, and well-crafted writing. It deserves a wide audience among teachers, students, and fans of Ellison, as well as others who hope for more sophisticated political discussions about history, identity, and race.” “Specialists in the fields of literature, religion, race, and American history,” concluded a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “will find [in it] many important ideas.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Christian Century, October 11, 2017, David M. Wilmington, review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology, p. 55.
Publishers Weekly, March 13, 2017, review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology, p. 79.
ONLINE
Indiana University Bloomington Website, http://indiana.edu/ (February 14, 2018), author profile.
Indiana University Department of Religious Studies Website, http://indiana.edu/ (February 14, 2018), author profile.
Reading Religion, http://readingreligion.org/ (August 14, 2017), Tyler Davis, review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theory.
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M. Cooper HarrissAssistant ProfessorSycamoreHall230Department of Religious Studies 1033 E. 3rdStreetIndiana UniversityBloomington, IN 47405charriss@indiana.eduUpdated December2016EDUCATIONUniversity of Chicago Divinity School (Ph.D., 2011) Dissertation: Race and the ReligiousUnconscious: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible TheologyYale University Divinity School and Institute of Sacred Music (M.A.R., 2003)University of Chicago, Division of Social Sciences (A.M., 1998)Washington & Lee University, The College (BA, 1997)PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENTIndiana University, Bloomington, IN (2014-present):Department of Religious Studies: Assistant ProfessorDepartment of Folklore and Ethnomusicology: Adjunct ProfessorUniversity of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA (2012-14):Department of Religious Studies: Postdoctoral Associate (2012-14) Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, (2010-12):Department of Religion and Culture: Visiting Assistant Professorof Race and ReligionUniversity of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2008, 2009)The Divinity School: Instructor The College: InstructorBOOKSRalph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press 2017)Muhammad Ali and the Irony of American Religion(manuscript in progress)JOURNAL ARTICLES“Preacherly Texts: Zora Neale Hurston and the Homiletics of Literature,” The Journal of Africana Religions 4:2 (2016): 278-90.“One Blues Invisible: Civil Rights and Civil Religion in Ralph Ellison’s Second Novel,” African American Review 47:2-3 (Summer/Fall 2014[2015]): 247-66“On the Eirobiblical: Critical Mimesis and Ironic Resistance in theConfessions of Nat Turner,” Biblical Interpretation 21:4-5 (Autumn 2013): 469-93“From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse: Just Representations and the Epistemology of Race in the ‘Negro Novel,’” The Journal of Religion93:3(July 2013): 259-90“’Where Is the Voice Coming From?’: Rhetoric, Religion, and Violence in theConfessions of Nat Turner,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 89:1-2 (Spring/Summer 2006 [2007]): 135-70BOOK CHAPTERS“From Revelation back to Genessee: Biblical Reception in African-American Verbal Folklore,” in Eric J. Ziolkowski, ed., Handbook of Biblical Reception in the World’s Folklores, vol. 2 (in press, De Gruyter)
2“Two Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man: Race, the Secular, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology” in Jonathon Kahn and Vincent Lloyd, eds., Race and Secularism in America (Columbia University Press, 2016): 153-77.“Let Us Not Falter Before Our Complexity: Barack Obama and the Legacy of Ralph Ellison,” in Heather Harris, Kimberly Moffitt, and Catherine Squires, eds., The Obama Effect: Multidisciplinary Renderings of the 2008 Presidential Campaign (SUNY, 2010): 116-30.REVIEWSAllen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible, Callaloo 31:2 (Spring 2008): 636-40Roger Lundin, From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority, The Journal of Religion88:2 (April 2008): 253-55Clarence Hardy, III, James Baldwin’s God: Sex, Hope, and Crisis in Black Holiness Culture, Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas 37 (November 2006)JOURNAL ARTICLES IN PROGRESS“Toward a Homiletics of Literature”“Time, Narrative, and All that Jazz: Ellison, Ricoeur, and Culture’s Jagged Grain”“’That’s the Way the Whole Thing Ends’: The Album and Eschatology inGillian Welch’sTime (the Revelator)”“That Shakespeherian Rag: Eliot andEllison atthe Cultural Divide”“Fear and Trembling in St. Paul: Irony and Hipster Culture in the Religious Turn”BOOK CHAPTERS IN PROGRESS“The Bible in Literature,” in Claudia Setzer and David Shefferman, eds., The Bible in America (Updated) (SBL Press)REVIEWS IN PROGRESSChristopher Douglas, If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right, The Journal of American StudiesMarc Conner and Lucas Morel, The New Territory: Ralph Ellison in the Twenty-First Century, Callaloo David F. Allmendinger, Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County, Patrick H. Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt, Nat Turner in Jerusalemat the New York Theater Workshop, and Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation forMarginalia Review of BooksENCYCLOPEDIA ARTICLES “Douglass, Frederick,” “Freedom: Literature,” “Harlem Renaissance: Literature,” Hughes, Langston,”“Johnson, James Weldon,” “Malcolm X,” “Nation of Islam,” “Turner, Nat,” in Dale C. Allison, Jr., Christine Helmer, Thomas Römer, Hans Joseph Klauk, Bernard McGinn, Choon Leong-Seow, Hermann Spieckermann, Barry Dov Walfish, and Eric J. Ziolkowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (DeGruyter)ONLINEPUBLICATIONS“The Great American Novel as Theology of Exceptionalism,”The Immanent Frame(forthcoming)“Taking Exception: How Muhammad Ali Transformed American Religion,” Sightings (June 9, 2016)“Death Gospel and the Heart of Saturday Night,” Sightings(February 9, 2012)“American Idolatry: The King James Version,” Sightings (July 15, 2010)
3Response toJacqueline Bussie, “Flowers in the Dark: African American Consciousness, Laughter, and Resistance in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Religion and Culture Web Forumof the Martin Marty Center (July 2009)“Updike’s Motions of Grace,” Sightings (February 5, 2009) “E Pluribus Obama,” Sightings(November 13, 2008) Reprinted in Circa: News from the University of Chicago Divinity School 31 (Winter 2009): 10-11, 15.“Race, Myth, and Ritual in Jena,” Sightings(October 4, 2007) “Religion in Modern Times,” Sightings(August 10, 2006). Reprinted in the Criterion Special Issue: “Celebrating Sightings”(2008): 33-34.CONFERENCES, SYMPOSIA, AND WORKSHOPS COORDINATED“Taking Exception: Queering American Religion,” Workshop, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, March-April 2017 (Co-Coordinator with Sarah Imhoff)INVITED LECTURES,SYMPOSIA, AND WORKSHOPSWorkshop, The Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad Project, Northwestern University and Indiana University, Geneva, IL, May, 2017.“The Religion of Karl Ove Knausgaard, Part Two,” Workshop,Columbia University Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, New York City, January 2017“Theological Perspectives on U.S. Exceptionalism,” Workshop, The Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad Project, Northwestern University and Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, October 2016“The Religion of Karl Ove Knausgaard,” Workshop, Columbia University Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, New York City, January 2016Symposium on Religion and Literature (participant), Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, April 2014“Thee Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man: Race, Religion, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology,” Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, January 2014“Three Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man,” Colloquium on American Literature and Culture, New York University, NYC, May 2013“Ali Akbar, or, The Fighter Who Wouldn’t Fight: Religion, Violence, andthe Usable Black Body in Muhammad Ali’s Nation of Islam,” Department of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA, April 2013“Five Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man, or Race: The Religious Dimensions of a Secular Concept,” Race and Secularism in America Symposium, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, October 2012“Canonicity and the Widening Gyre,” Research Seminar, Department of Religious Studies, Manhattan College, Riverdale, NY, February 2012“Ali Akbar: Religion, Violence, andForm in Muhammad Ali’s Nation of Islam,” Plenary Address, Southern Humanities Council Annual Meeting, Louisville, KY, February 2012“The Craft of Teaching,” Inaugural Seminar, University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, IL, January 2012“Divining Irony in African-American Religion and Culture,” Department of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, September 2011“One Blues Invisible: E Pluribus Unumand Civil Religion in Ralph Ellison’s Second Novel,” Department of Religious Studies, Millsaps College, Jackson, MS, March 2010
4CONFERENCE PAPERSRespondent, “Mass Media, Public Literacy in the Lutheran Reformation,”(Annual Meeting, Indiana Association of Historians, Lafayette, IN, February 2017)“Muhammad Ali and the irony of American Exceptionalism,”(Annual Meeting of the Southern Humanities Council, Louisville, KY, January 2017)“Such You Are Called to See: Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nationamong the Religionists,” (Roundtable session co-sponsored by the Afro-American Religious History Group and the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group, Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Antonio, TX, November 2016)“That Shakespeherian Rag: Eliot, Ellison, and the Cultural Divide,” (Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Religion, Literature,and Culture, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK, September 2016)Panelist, “Ralph Ellison’s Flying Home Stories,” (Sponsored by the Ralph Ellison Society, Annual Meeting of the American Literature Association, San Francisco, CA, May 2016)“Above the Veil: Nathan A. Scott, Jr. and the Theological Apprenticeship of Ralph Ellison,” (Annual Meeting of the American Literature Association, San Francisco, CA, May 2016)Respondent, Panel on Death Narratives, Indiana University Religious Studies Graduate Student Conference (Bloomington, IN, April 2016)“Fear and Trembling in St. Paul: Irony and Hipster Culture in the Religious Turn,” (Annual Meeting of the Southern Humanities Council, Louisville, KY, January 2016)“Resurrecting Nat Turner: History, Fiction, and Changing Discourses of Race and Religion after the Styron Affair,” (Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Atlanta, GA, November 2015)“Fear and Trembling in St. Paul: Irony and Hipster Culturein the Religious Turn” (Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Portland, OR, November 2015)“Is Muhammad Ali a Sacred or Secular Text?” (Sacred Literature, Secular Religion, LeMoyne College/Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, October 2015)“Time (the Narrator): Memory and Eschatology in Gillian Welch’s Old, Old Story,” (Ethics of Storytelling: Historical Imagination in Contemporary Literature, Media, and Visual Arts, University of Turku, Turku, Finland, June 2015)Respondent, Panel on Religion in the Americas, Indiana University Religious Studies Graduate Student Conference (Bloomington, IN, April 2015)“That’s the Way the Whole Thing Ends: Theorizing the Album,” (Annual Meeting of the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association, New Orleans, LA, April 2015)“‘I Sense More than I Can Say: Nathan A. Scott, Jr. and the Theological Apprenticeship of Ralph Ellison,” (God and the American Writer: A Symposium Sponsored by the American Literature Association, San Antonio, TX, February 2015)“You Have Overcome: The Myth of Yakub, the Mothership, and the Postcolonial Future,” (Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Religion, Literature, and Culture, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, September 2014)“That Shakespeherian Rag: Eliot, Ellison, and the Cultural Divide,” (Other Eliots, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, April 2014)“Ali Akbar, or, The Fighter Who Wouldn’t Fight: Religion, Violence, and the Body in Muhammad Ali’s Nation of Islam” (Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Baltimore, MD, November 2013)“You Slip into the Breaks and Look Around: Time and Narrative in Ralph Ellison’s Fiction” (Annual Meeting of the Southern Humanities Council, Savannah, GA, February 2013)
5Panelist and Session Organizer, “What Is Religious About African-American Literature: Engaging and Reframing Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature?” (Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Chicago, IL, November 2012)Panelist and Session Co-Organizer, “Theory and Method in Religion and Literature” (Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Chicago, IL, November 2012)“On the Eirobiblical: The Rhetoric of Biblical Rhetoric in The Confessions of Nat Turner” (Spiritual Matters/Matters of Spirit, Annual Conference of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, Asheville, NC, March 2012)“On the Eirobiblical: The Rhetoric of Biblical Rhetoric and the Construction of African-American Identity” (Performing Identities in American Literature, Durham University, Durham, UK, September 2011)Discussant and Moderator, Brian Bertoti Innovative Perspectives in History Graduate Conference, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, March 2011.“To Move Without Moving: Invisible Manand the Irony of American History” (Jesters and Gestures: Irony at a Crossroads, City University of New York, New York City, February 2011)“A Sense of Ending: The Album, Narrative, and Eschatology in Time (the Revelator)” (Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Atlanta, GA, November 2010)“On the Pseudobiblical: Biblical Rhetoric and Mimesis in the Narratives of American Slavery” (Re-Writing the Bible: Devotion, Diatribe and Dialogue, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, June 2010)“A Genealogy of Sin: Theology, Race, and Nationin Ralph Ellison’s Nineteenth Century” (Annual Meeting of the Southern Humanities Council, Asheville, NC, February 2010)“’Black Is an’ Black A’int’: Ralph Ellison’s Cosmology of Race” (North American Religions Workshop, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, January 2009)“’Brave Words for a Startling Occasion’: Barak Obama’s ‘More Perfect Union’ and the Legacy of Ralph Ellison” (The Obama Effect, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, October 2008)“Ralph Ellison, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Irony of the Common Good” (The Common Good in Transition and Translation, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, October 2008)“Exile Blues: Ralph Ellison’s ‘Territory’ and the Inventions of Home” (Annual Meeting of the Southern Humanities Council, Knoxville, TN, February 2008)“Preacherly Antecedents of the Speakerly Text: Sermons in the Anthropological Writing of Zora Neale Hurston” (Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Diego,CA, November 2007)“The Book of Nat: Biblical Rhetoric, Conversion Narratives, and the Textual Quagmire of Nat Turner’s ‘Confessions’” (Annual Meeting of the Midwest American Academy of Religion, River Forest, IL, March / April 2006)*Winner of GraduateStudent Prize“The Sermon in the Anthropological Writings of Zora Neale Hurston” (Annual Meeting of the Southern Humanities Council, Asheville, NC, February 2006)“Defender of the Faith: Religion in the ChicagoDefender, 1935-53”(Annual Meeting of the Midwest American Academy of Religion, Chicago, IL, April 2005) “Everything is Broken: American Vernacular Music and the Theology of Culture” (Session Chair and Organizer, Annual Meeting of the Southern Humanities Council, Athens, GA, February 2003)
6COLLOQUIA AND WORKSHOPS (HOME INSTITUTION)“Trope-a-Dope: Is Muhammad Ali and the Irony of American Religion,” Faculty Colloquium, Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, March2016.“Zora Neale Hurston and the Homiletics ofLiterature,” Dinner Discussion with Indiana University’s Undergraduate Religious Studies Association (URSA), Bloomington, IN, November 2015.“Ali Akbar: or, The Fighter Who Wouldn’t Fight: Ironies of Race, Religion, and Violence in Muhammad Ali’s Nation of Islam,” Religious Studies Colloquium, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, November 2013.“Four Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man,” Center for the Study of Race and Social Problems, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2013.“‘The Blackness of Blackness’: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology,” Religion and Culture Seminar Series, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, December 2010.MEDIA, COMMUNITY,AND PUBLIC PRESENTATIONSGuest Discussant of Bob Dylan and the blues, “Blue Monday with Jason Fickel,”WFHB-FM radio, Bloomington, IN, October 2016“The Faith of Muhammad Ali,” Religion and Ethics Report, Australian Broadcasting Company Radio(June 8, 2016)Segment on Religion and Sports, “The Gray Area of Religion,” American Student Radio (January 2016)“Zora Neale Hurston and the Blues” episode of Interchange on WFHB-FM, Bloomington, IN (November 24, 2015)Guest Discussant of Zora Neale Hurston, blues, and gospel music, “Blue Monday with Jason Fickel,” WFHB-FM radio, Bloomington, IN, November 2015“God’s Trombones: James Weldon Johnson’s Sermonic Poetry,” Adult Forum at Trinity Episcopal Church, Bloomington, IN, February 2015“Muhammad Ali,” Creek/Love classroom (grades 1-2), Rogers Elementary School, Bloomington, IN, January 2015“James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombones,” Episcopal Church of the Redeemer, Pittsburgh, PA, February 2014.“Barack Obama, Ellisonian: What Ralph Ellison Can Teach Us about President Obama.” Panel participant with Dwight Hopkins and Margaret Mitchellon the religious dimensions of Obama’s candidacy and presidency, Visiting Committee of the University of ChicagoDivinity School, Chicago, IL, February 2009. “Twentieth Century American Preachers and Their Contexts.” Lecture series at Western Springs Congregational Church, Western Springs, IL, March/April 2008. Topics: Harry Emerson Fosdick, Aimee Semple McPherson, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Jr., and William Sloane Coffin, Jr.HONORS AND AWARDSYoung Scholars in American Religion Program, Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, 2016-18Favorite Faculty Award, Virginia Tech,April 2012Future Faculty Program Honoree, Virginia Tech, January 2012Future Faculty Program Honoree, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, September 2011Graduate Paper Prize:2006 Midwest AAR Annual Meeting: “The Book of Nat: Biblical Rhetoric, Conversion Narratives, and the Textual Quagmire of Nat Turner’s ‘Confessions’”NEH Summer Institute for High School Teachers, Chapel Hill, NC, July 1999
7FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTSCAHI Research Fellowship, College Arts and Humanities Institute, Indiana University, for book preparation Muhammad Ali and the Irony of American Religion, 2017-18CAHI Grant (with Sarah Imhoff) ($9,500), College Arts and Humanities Institute, Indiana University, for Research Workshop “Taking Exception: Queering American Religion,” 2016-17Ostrom Grant (with Sarah Imhoff) ($8,000), Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences, for Research Workshop “Taking Exception: Queering American Religion,” 2016-17Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship in Arts and Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 2012-2014Diversity Grant ($5,000), Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Department Diversity Funding Awardto fund“Christianities of the GlobalSouth” seminar, March 2012Harrison-Doolittle Fellowship, University of Chicago, Summer 2010Divinity School Association Travel Grant, Archival Research in the Ralph Ellison Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (2009)Junior (Dissertation) Fellowship, Martin E. Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, University of Chicago Divinity School (2008-09)Nathan A. and Charlotte Scott Dissertation Fellowship, University of Chicago Divinity School 2007-08Fellow, The Jerald Brauer Seminar, Martin E. Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, University of Chicago Divinity School, Spring, 2006Perrin Fund Travel Grant, University of Chicago Divinity School,2004-06, 2010Doctoral Fellowship, University of Chicago Divinity School, 2003-2007Institute Fellowship, Yale Divinity School & Institute of Sacred Music,2000-03COURSES TAUGHTIntroduction to Religion in America (IU) (UG)Religion and Sports (IU) (UG)American Preaching: Word, Performance, and Media (IU) (UG/G)Muhammad Ali and Postwar American Religion(IU) (UG/G)Taking Exception: American Counternarratives and the Study of Religion (IU) (Gseminar)Disaster in American Religion and Culture(IU)(UG)New Religious Movements in the Americas(IU)(UG)American Religious Historical Fiction(IU)(UG/G)Zora Neale Hurston(IU)(UG/G)Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in American Religion(IU)(UG)Race, Religion, and American Literature (G-reading course)Gadamer and Ricoeur (IU) (G-reading course)Religious Themes in American Literature(PITT)Race and Religion in America: Mormonism and the Nation of Islam(PITT)The Black Church(PITT)Religion and the Modern World(VT)Religion in American Lite(VT)Religion and Literature(VT)The Black Church inAmerica(VT)The Holocaust: Religion, History, Representation, and Memory (tutorial)(VT)Irony in Religion and Literature(Chicagoand IU)(UG/G)Preachers and Preaching in American Literature(Chicago)(G)
8GUEST TEACHINGInvisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Argonautsby Maggie Nelson in Constance Furey’s “Religion and Social Criticism”(REL-R 661), Indiana University Department of Religious Studies, September 2016Invisible Manby Ralph Ellison in Richard Rosengarten’s “Religion, Modernity, and the Novel II”(RLIT 43902), University of Chicago Divinity School, January 2012UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH SUPERVISION“The Art of Losing: Finding Devotion in Artistic Expressionsof Loss,” Honors Thesis (Reader), Religious Studies, Indiana University, Spring 2016“The Religious Authority of Black Preachers in African-American Literature,” Senior Capstone Project, Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2013“Religious Authority in African American Film, 1930s-1950s,” Senior Capstone Project, Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh, Fall 2013“Integration at Camp Bethel: The Dessie Miller Story,” Honors Research Project, Virginia Tech, Fall 2011RELEVANT PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCEEditor, The Religion and Culture Web Forum, Martin Marty Center, University of Chicago, 2009-2010Managing Editor, Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy (University of Chicago Press), 2007-2008Editorial Assistant, Ethics: An International Journal of Social,Political, and Legal Philosophy (University of Chicago Press), 2004-2007Writing Consultant, Yale Divinity School, 2002-2003High School English Teacher (grades 10-12), Stratford Academy, Macon, GA, 1998-2000SERVICE TO THE PROFESSIONManuscript Reviewer for Political TheologyManuscript Reviewer for The Journal of Africana ReligionsManuscript Reviewer for The Journal of ReligionExecutive Board, Southern Humanities CouncilAdvisory Board, Center for Sermon Studies at Marshall UniversitySERVICE TO INDIANA UNIVERSITYUndergraduate Studies Committee, 2014-16Salary and Review Committee, 2016-17PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONSAmerican Academy of ReligionAmerican LiteratureAssociationInternational Society for Religion, Literature,and CultureModern Language Association Southern Humanities CouncilREFERENCES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
M. COOPER HARRISS
Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
Adjunct Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology
Contact
charriss@indiana.edu
Sycamore Hall, Rm. 207
Education
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2011
M.A.R., Yale Divinity School, 2003
A.M., University of Chicago, 1998
B.A., Washington and Lee University, 1997
Research Interests
Religion in the Americas
Religion and Literature
Race and Religion
Irony and Performativity
Professional Biography
My research and teaching dwell critically upon historical texts (including literature, vernacular music, preaching, and performance) to discern ways in which religious thought, belief, and practice both contribute to and are generated by the formation of diverse American cultures and identities. I am particularly interested in the religious and theological dimensions of the concept of race, tracing various critical religious terms of its development and cultural expression in American, African-American, and transnational contexts.
Two book projects occupy my present energies. The first (Things Which Are Not Seen: Race, Religion, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology) marshals archival research, close reading, and studies in religion, literature, and secularism, aiming broadly at two objectives: 1) It argues that diverse iterations of religious study afford a transformative lens for understanding the work of a prominent, yet problematic, African-American author and thinker. 2) It stakes the larger and more ambitious claim that Ellison’s literary conception of race articulates an ‘invisible theology’ that proves vital for negotiating changing dynamics of racial identity amid growing ambiguities of twenty-first-century American, transnational, and global contexts (including the post-racial and the post-secular—such as they may be).
The second, more nascent, book (The Word and its Contradiction: Divining Irony in African-American Religion and Culture) frames the concept of irony as a critical trope for understanding convergences of religion and culture in African-American and broader colonial and diasporic contexts. It pays particular attention to ironies of biblical rhetoric in slave narratives, Frederick Douglass’s multiple autobiographical selves, matters of signification and Signifyin(g), Saturday night and Sunday morning, Muhammad Ali, and August Wilson.
Elsewhere I have written on Nat Turner, Bob Dylan, Zora Neale Hurston, American and African-American biblical reception, and the contemporary musical genre known as Death Gospel. Other interests and future teaching / research projects include a comparative study of the Latter-Day Saints and the Nation of Islam, “ruination” in American religion and culture, the uses and abuses of fiction in American religious history, a cultural history of African-American preaching, and the music album as eschatological narrative.
Awards
Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh (2012-14)
Junior (Dissertation) Fellowship, Martin E. Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion, University of Chicago Divinity School (2008-09)
Courses Recently Taught
REL-R 160: Introduction to Religion in America
REL-C 300: Disaster in American Religion and Culture
REL-C 355: New Religious Movements in the Americas
REL-C 401/ -r 532: American Religious Historical Fiction
Publication Highlights
Books
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology (NYU Press, 2017)
Selected articles
“Preacherly Texts: Zora Neale Hurston and the Homiletics of Literature,” The Journal of Africana Religions 4:2 (2016).
“Two Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man: Race, the Secular, and Ralph Ellison’s Second Novel,” in Jonathon Kahn and Vincent Lloyd, eds., Race and Secularism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 153-77.
“One Blues Invisible: Civil Rights and Civil Religion in Ralph Ellison’s Second Novel,” African American Review 47: 2-3 (Summer/Fall 2014): 247-66
“On the Eirobiblical: Critical Mimesis and Ironic Resistance in The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Biblical Interpretation 21:4-5 (Autumn 2013): 469-93
“From Harlem Renaissance to Harlem Apocalypse: Just Representations and the Epistemology of Race in the ‘Negro Novel,’” The Journal of Religion 93:3 (July 2013): 259-90
Book Chapters
“From Revelation Back to Genesee: Biblical Reception in African-American Verbal Folklore,” in Eric J. Ziolkowski, ed., Handbook on Biblical Reception in the World’s Folklores (DeGruyter)—forthcoming
“Two Ways of Looking at an Invisible Man: Race, the Secular, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology,” in Jonathon Kahn and Vincent Lloyd, eds., Race and Secularism in America (Columbia University Press, forthcoming)
“Let Us Not Falter Before our Complexity: Barack Obama and the Legacy of Ralph Ellison,” in Heather Harris, Kimberly Moffitt, and Catherine Squires, eds., The Obama Effect: Multidisciplinary Renderings of the 2008 Presidential Campaign (SUNY, 2010): 116-30
Op-Eds and Blogs
“Death Gospel and the Heart of Saturday Night,” Sightings (February 9, 2012)
“Updike’s Motions of Grace,” Sightings (February 5, 2009)
“E Pluribus Obama,” Sightings (November 13, 2008)
“Religion in Modern Times,” Sightings (August 10, 2006)
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology
David M. Wilmington
The Christian Century. 134.21 (Oct. 11, 2017): p55+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Century Foundation
http://www.christiancentury.org
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Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology
By M. Cooper Harriss
New York University Press, 288 pp., $30.00
What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children!" wrote novelist Ralph Ellison in 1954, in response to Brown v. Board of Education. He continued: "For me there is still the problem of making meaning out of the past ... I'm writing about the evasion of identity which is another characteristically American problem which must be about to change."
One of the most valuable and sensitively presented aspects of M. Cooper Harriss's new book is its attempt to account for why Ellison, after the success of his first novel, Invisible Man, struggled so mightily, and ultimately failed, to finish his second novel. If we take Ellison at his word that "making meaning out of the past" and "the evasion of identity" were central to his vision for that novel, contemporary readers can commiserate. Ellison is one of the most intriguing, challenging, promising, and enigmatic elements of our past with whom we must struggle.
On the one hand, Ellison earned immediate acclaim from black and white critics (including winning the National Book Award and being given the inaugural National Medal of Arts), and Invisible Man became a staple of college literature courses as well as a perpetual candidate for "Best American Novel" lists. On the other hand, Ellison's challenges to both politically oriented "protest literature" (in the mode of Richard Wright, for example) and the sociological mode of interpreting black American experience place him in an uncomfortable and increasingly antagonistic relationship with American literary and political culture. At a time when cultural discourse is especially destabilized around the question of whether "essentializing" race is either a necessary tactic for survival (such that we must insist that "Black Lives Matter") or a terrible vestige of racist colonialism (in which "whiteness" is a cultural and political virus), Ellison's more fundamental, existentialist riffing on "invisibility"--and the possibilities for making visible an individual in his distinctly black American humanity--offers us a bracing but hopeful reorientation.
Harriss aims to rescue Ellison from neglect and misinterpretation by taking seriously a complex network of Ellison's literary, political, sociological, and theological interlocutors from the 1930s through the 1990s. Few literary scholars of Ellison may be familiar with the theology that underlies Harriss's fleet-footed engagements with Friedrich Schleiermacher, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and Nathan A. Scott. Few theologians may be conversant with Harriss's careful readings of Ellison's texts and their complex relationships to Herman Melville, Richard Wright, Alain Locke, Kenneth Burke, Frederick Douglass, and the blues idiom. And few contemporary scholars of African American studies will come to this book familiar with the interpretations Harriss offers of reactions to the destruction of Jim Crow or Brown v. Board of Education by such luminaries as Ellison, Scott, Zora Neale Hurston, and Albert Murray.
For decades scholarly accounts have veered between two simplistic views of Ellison: as a stodgy accommodationist Uncle Tom not even worthy of the title "black writer" or solely as the lionized author of Invisible Man. Amid this bipolar reception history, Harriss argues that Ellison's account of race is "a broadly metaphysical or religiously oriented representation," an inherently theological form of invisibility. After tracing a shift from the Harlem Renaissance to the "corrective" and more "apocalyptic" spirit embodied by Invisible Man, Harriss situates Ellison theologically within the thought of Niebuhr and Tillich. Harriss demonstrates that Ellison's crucial concept of "antagonistic cooperation" is not only rooted in a blues sensibility (even more pronounced in his friend Murray's work) but is also "a form of Niebuhrian irony." While this is only one of several key theses in Harriss's argument, it is one of the most persuasive for framing Ellison's conception of race as theological.
Drawing from published texts as well as letters and other documents in the Ellison archives, Harriss introduces and explicates the work of Nathan A. Scott (a pioneer in the study of literature in theology) and his relationship to Ellison. This relationship reveals that although Ellison and his sources and interlocutors may be a "minority report" to post-1950s political, sociological, and artistic orthodoxies, they have never ceased to be a compelling alternative.
Along with explaining varied reactions to and interpretations of Brown v. Board of Education, Harriss recovers the rich and passionately argued range and dynamism of thought about race in America that, while perhaps leading to Ellison's failure to complete his second novel, allow us to hear some largely unfamiliar and underappreciated voices. Indeed, if more 21st-century artists, theologians, and critics were to consider the trajectory of post-1950 racial, sociological, and political orthodoxies (and their current progeny) alongside the intellectual pedigrees, journeys, and vision of the constellation of black American thinkers and writers surrounding Ellison and Scott, they might find it helpful and hopeful to tune into these "alternative frequencies." In addition, Harriss's clear explanation of why Ellison quickly came to seem so out-of-step with the culture paves the way for his account of the fundamentally religious dynamic within Ellison's thought.
The book's comparative interpretations of Herman Melville--including The Confidence Man, as well as the expected Moby-Dick--and Frederick Douglass are immensely helpful. Douglass shares with Ellison the interpretive fate of suffering a frequently simplistic and narrow contemporary accounting. Without overemphasizing the connection, Harriss suggests Douglass as the prototypical "invisible man" and points to Ellison's characterization in a 1947 review of a Douglass biography as "startlingly close to the concept of invisibility that [he] had toyed with since he first wrote out the sentence 'I am an invisible man' in 1944 or 1945."
Curiously, considering the clarity and insight on display through most of the book, Harriss seems at times to fall prey to the tired modernist account of religion as, at least partly, unreasonable myth construction. When we encounter something absurd that lacks reason, Harriss asks in the introduction, "what more appropriate critical lens might we appeal to, then, than a religious one?" Similarly, his careful and capacious interpretive eye seems to fail him when he attempts to incorporate contemporary political events (such as Clint Eastwood's semi-improvised "empty chair" comic stunt at the RNC in 2012) into his account of Ellisonian invisibility.
While unconvincing in these specifics, Harriss's book is an impressive accomplishment reflecting careful thought, patient research, and well-crafted writing. It deserves a wide audience among teachers, students, and fans of Ellison, as well as others who hope for more sophisticated political discussions about history, identity, and race.
Reviewed by David M. Wilmington, who teaches theology and philosophy at the Yellowstone Theological Institute in Bozeman, Montana.
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology
Publishers Weekly. 264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p79.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology
M. Cooper Harriss. New York Univ., $30 (288p) ISBN 978-1-4798-2301-7
Harriss, professor of religion at Indiana University, articulates the religious dimension of Ralph Ellison's life and work in this scholarly study. Arguing that race has the same interplay of the particular and the universal that defines religion, Harriss shows how Ellison's notion of invisibility counters the view of him as a thoroughgoing secularist. Secularity is religion made invisible, Harriss writes, and mapped onto other differences, such as race. Each chapter brings Ellison into conversation with other thinkers to show a religious lineage to his thinking while also tackling a chronological period or particular theme. These figures include Zora Neale Hurston, Reinhold Niebuhr, Nathan A. Scott Jr., and Paul Tillich. Though the prime focus is Ellison's Invisible Man and its reception, Harriss brings in his biography, teaching career, and unpublished work to round out these claims. The prose is not arresting, but it's clear and relatively persuasive. Harriss offers an intriguing way to rethink what religion looks like--even when it's invisible--in America. Specialists in the fields of literature, religion, race, and American history will find many important ideas to wrestle with in the work. (May)
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Theology
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M. Cooper Harriss
North American Religions
New York, NY: NYU Press , May 2017. 288 pages.
$30.00. Hardcover. ISBN 9781479823017. For other formats: Link to Publisher's Website.
Review
M. Cooper Harriss’s monograph, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology, brings into focus the religious and theological dimensions of Ralph Ellison’s authorship. Against reductive tendencies of materialist and secular accounts of racial identity, Harriss argues that Ellison’s understanding of race—characterized as an invisible theology in a secular age—makes possible a reconsideration of the relation between race, religion, and secularism. In order to draw the religious aspects of racial life into view, Harriss proceeds along two lines: genealogically, he situates Ellison’s writings in an array of religious and theological contexts. These include, for example, attending to different genealogies of invisibility, which inflect Ellison’s own seminal use of the term, Ellison’s friendship with Nathan A. Scott Jr., and his attachment to the literary legacy of American Calvinism.
The recovery of Ellison and his religious contexts, however, is in service of Harriss’s second and more basic argument. This argument is that Ellison’s writings structurally procure an invisible theology, or a religiously-charged notion of racial life underscored by ambiguity and indeterminacy, which Harriss culls from Ellison’s relentless examination of the tensions between multiple forms of identity. Although certain difficulties surface in terms of distinguishing these threads—that is, on the one hand, separating Harriss’s identification of religious analogies and genealogical habits of mind from, on the other hand, his argument that Ellison is a patterned theologian of the invisible—Harriss maintains this structural and genealogical distinction throughout, holding them side-by-side with the latter functioning to support the former.
Invisible Theology makes a number of interventions. First, it participates in theorizing the entanglements of race, religion, and secularism. Harriss posits an interdependence thesis with regard to these terms: religion is neither the absence nor the antithesis of the secular; more precisely, it functions as the secular’s surrogate (2-4, 32-33,192). With regard to understanding racial formation, Invisible Theology investigates religious concepts that inform shifting ideas of race across Ellison’s writings. Harriss’s contention is not that racial formation in Ellison should be thought of as a religious instead of a secular concept; rather, race is a secular concept precisely due to that it is internally indivisible from religious antecedents (191). Given this network of connections, Harriss’s book belongs among recent studies which explicate dynamic crossings between race, religion, and secularism—for example, Theodore Vial’s Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Second, Invisible Theology marshals the resources of religious studies to foreground unappreciated dimensions of literary texts. Harriss’s book particularly stands with other studies engaging the neglected religious aspects of twentieth-century African American literature including Josef Sorett’s Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2016). Harriss’s distinctive methodological points are noteworthy: naming the presence of religion and theology in Ellison’s fiction does not depend on its belonging to a confessional standpoint; instead, taking cues from the hermeneutical tradition which includes Friedrich Schleiermacher, Clifford Geertz, and Paul Tillich, Harriss means for these characterizations to specify a negotiation of hyphenated and oppositional identities—say, racial and national—and the process through which tensions between particular and universal identities ramify as concerns of penultimate and ultimate meaning (14, 33, 88-91). Harriss therefore cooperatively pairs religion and theology as “critically cofunctional,” partitioning religion as the process or maneuvering of identities in social worlds, and theology as phenomenal matters of meaning (16-17).
One of the most distinct interventions of Invisible Theology comes by way of Harriss’s casting of Ellison as a subject in need of sustained attention in religious and theological studies. A—perhaps underexplored—provocation that emerges from tracking the relays between religion and race in Ellison is that Harriss’s reading implies generative friction with other prominent receptions of Ellison, for instance, the religious naturalist and pragmatist-Emersonian reception of Beth Eddy’s The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison (Princeton University Press, 2003) and Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition (Princeton University Press, 2004). This friction is most clearly evident in the discussion of Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass as close theological ancestors of Ellison (147-178, cf. 14).
Harriss’s book also raises questions about the relation between Ellison’s invisible theology and early black theology. While Black Power and the Black Arts Movement function as accent walls for Harriss’s elaboration of Ellison’s invisibility given certain dismissals of Ellison as an accommodationist, or as an unconcerned aesthete—a point illustrated, as Harriss repeats, by a black studies librarian who held that Ellison was “not a black writer” (36, 192). The differences internal to these movements are elided in Harriss’s defense of Ellison. More to the point, additional attention to early black theology—beyond Martin Luther King Jr.—could nuance the defense of Ellison’s invisible theology given its parallels to both Ellison’s racial imaginary and critical investments in Black Power. James Cone’s eschatological black theology and his theology of black music, for example, would complicate this differentiation in that: 1) Cone writes in solidarity with Black Power and the Black Arts Movement, and yet his eschatology eschews, like Ellison, romantic notions of racial identity; 2) moreover, Cone’s early writings stake the position that the blues are the mode of eschatology and apocalyptic, which finds resonance with Harriss’s compelling reading of Invisible Man’s apocalyptic (60-68).
In any case—as I hope is clear—Harriss’s Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Theology provides a suggestive, learned, and accessible entrance into Ellison’s life and work which creatively appraises the theological significance of Ellison’s thought while also contributing to conversations on race, religion, and secularism as well as religion and literature.
About the Reviewer(s):
Tyler Davis is a doctoral student in theology and ethics at Baylor University.
Date of Review:
August 14, 2017
About the Author(s)/Editor(s)/Translator(s):
M. Cooper Harriss is assistant professor in the department of religious studies at Indiana University.