Personal profile

Research Interests

U.S. Religious History

Professional Information

Professor Ebel's research program involves religion and war, religion and violence, and lay theologies of economic hardship all within the American context. His most recent book, From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California (NYU, 2023) examines the federal migratory farm labor camp system established in California during the Great Depression, as a site of missionary interaction between New Deal reformers and Dust Bowl migrants. He is also the author of G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (Yale, 2015), Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, 2010), and the co-editor of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (California, 2012). He is currently at work on a religious history of American warfare in five weapons.

Education

Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2004
B.A. Harvard University, 1993

Honors & Awards

President, American Society of Church History, 2023

Guggenheim Fellow, 2017-2018
Helen Corley Petit Scholar, 2012-2013
Conrad Humanities Scholar, 2015-2020

Grants

Louisville Institute Sabbatical Grant for Researchers, 2014-2015

Teaching

REL 236: Religion, Violence, and America
REL 510: Graduate Intro to the Study of Religion
REL 134: Religion, Race, and Resistance
REL 436: Religion in the U.S., 1900-1941
REL 235: History of Religion in America
REL / PHIL 110: World Religions
REL 437: Religion and American Cinema

Office Address

Department of Religion
3092B Foreign Language Building
707 South Mathews
Urbana, Illinois 61801

Office Phone

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  • Guggenheim Fellowship

    Ebel, J. (Recipient), 2017

    Prize: Prize/Award