Meet the Faculty

Kevin Lewis O'Neill

• Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
• Assistant Professor, American Studies Program
  

Education

• Ph.D. Stanford University, 2007

Contact Information

Background

• Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (Declined)
• Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
• Bernard J. Siegel Award for Outstanding Writing in Cultural Anthropology, Stanford University

  I received my PhD. in social and cultural anthropology from Stanford University and my masters’ degree in theological studies from Harvard University.  At its most basic, my research centers on the anthropological and theological themes of responsibility and belonging – both their social construction and emotional texture at everyday levels of knowledge.  Concretely speaking, however, I am an anthropologist of transnational Christianity with regional expertise in the Americas, especially Central America.  My book-in-progress is based on a 20-month study of evangelical Christianity’s growing influence on Guatemala’s postwar efforts at democratization.  It is an ethnography of a multinational evangelical mega-church in postwar Guatemala City and of the faithful who struggle to understand what it means to be a ‘Christian citizen’ in an ethnically diverse, class-divided, and desperately violent capital city.  The research addresses an issue critically important not just to Guatemala but also to countries throughout Latin America, Africa, and Asia, not to mention the United States of America.  These are all places where the continued entanglement of evangelical Christianity and democracy are unmistakable.  Other research interests include the anthropologies of genocide, neoliberalism, and masculinity as well as the history of anthropological thought and the ethics of ethnography.

Research Interests

• Latin America
• Neo-Pentecostal Christianity
• Cities and Citizenship
• Genocide and Violence
• Gender and Masculinities
• Neoliberalism

Courses Recently Taught

• Christianity and Democracy in the Americas
• Religion and Violence in Latin America

Publication Highlights

Books

Alex Hinton and Kevin O’Neill, editors. Truth/Memory/Representation and Genocide: Anthropological Approaches.  Forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Book Chapters

Kevin O’Neill and Alex Hinton "Representation and/in Post-Genocidal Contexts: An Introduction."  In Truth/Memory/Representation and Genocide: Anthropological Approaches.  pp. 1-35.  Edited by Alex Hinton and Kevin O’Neill.  Forthcoming with Duke University Press.

Kevin O’Neill, "Anthropology and Genocide.” In The Oxford Handbook on Genocide. Edited by Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses. Under contract at Oxford University Press.

Articles

"Armed Citizens and the Stories They Tell: The National Rifle Association Masculinity, and Rhetoric." Journal of  Men and Masculinities 9(4) (2007): 457-75.

"Writing Guatemala’s Genocide: Christianity and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions."  The Journal for Genocide Research 7(3) (2005): 310-331.

"Facing Risk: Levinas, Ethnography, and Ethics."  Anthropology of Consciousness, 18(2):22-55. With Peter Benson.

"Who is a Christian: Further Notes Towards an Anthropology of Christianity."  Under review at Anthropological Theory. With William Garriott.