November 9, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Steve Herrick
404-727-7948, sherrick@aarweb.org
Mark Juergensmeyer has been elected Vice President of the AAR. His one-year term as Vice President begins November 18, 2006. In that role, he will serve on the Program Committee and be in line to serve as AAR President in 2009.
Dr. Juergensmeyer is Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, Professor of Sociology, and affiliate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has also served as Dean of Hawaii, Asian, and Pacific Studies at the University of Hawaii. His M.Div. is from Union Theological Seminary in New York, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in political science are from the University of California, Berkeley.
He has been an AAR member for more than 30 years, participating in panels at a dozen Annual Meetings, serving on the JAAR editorial board and several task forces and committees, chairing the Committee on the Public Understanding of Religion, and serving as President of the Western Region.
Dr. Juergensmeyer has written 200 articles and a dozen books. His most recent is the Oxford Handbook of Global Religions (Oxford University Press, 2006). His Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition, 2003) was named by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. A previous book The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press, 1993) was named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year.
Dr. Juergensmeyer has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including the BBC, CNN, Fox News, NPR, Politically Incorrect, and the Dennis Miller Show.
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