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.

Works