Great Mythologies of the World

Professor Kathryn McClymond is Chair and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Georgia State University, where she has taught since 1999. Professor McClymond graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in History and Literature and later pursued her M.A. and Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her focus was on comparative ritual studies, with an emphasis on Hindu and Jewish traditions.

Professor McClymond has published widely on religion and ritual, focusing on sacrifice and violence. She also has been involved in collaborative research that emphasizes the importance of story and narrative in individual lives. Current projects include developing an oral history archive of the religious life stories of residents of Atlanta, Georgia, and an interdisciplinary program that encourages military personnel and veterans to integrate morally traumatic experiences into their own moral and ethical life stories.

Professor McClymond is the recipient of the Georgia State University College of Arts and Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award (2006) and the Georgia State University Distinguished Honors Professor Award (2002). In 2013, she was elected to the American Society for the Study of Religion. She also has been a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California.

Professor McClymond is the author of Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice and the forthcoming Ritual Gone Wrong: What We Learn from Ritual Disruption, as well as numerous academic articles.

Professor Julius H. Bailey is a Professor of Religion at the University of Redlands. He received a B.A. in Religious Studies from Occidental College and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include African mythology, African American religious history, and new religious movements. He teaches courses on varied aspects of religion.

Professor Bailey’s research focuses on the diverse experiences of the African diaspora. His first book is entitled Around the Family Altar: Domesticity in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1865–1900. This work examines the ideology of domesticity in the lives of African Americans in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church and its distinctiveness in light of recent studies of 19th-century white Protestant and Catholic homes. The book traces the efforts of AME Church leaders and members to apply notions of domesticity to the challenges facing the denomination after the Civil War, such as regional tensions, the restoration of families after slavery, the licensing of female preachers, and the spiritual nurturing of children.

Professor Bailey’s second book is Race Patriotism: Protest and Print Culture in the AME Church. This work analyzes the ways in which various understandings of race, gender, and place influenced the framing of social issues for African Americans in the 19th century. Issues discussed include westward migration, the selection of the appropriate referent for the race, social Darwinism, the viability of emigration to Africa, and cultural and religious connections to African traditional religions.

Professor Bailey’s research also looks at African American new religious movements. His work on this topic includes “‘Cult’ Knowledge: The Challenges of Studying New Religious Movements in America” (a chapter in Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back) and “The Final Frontier: Secrecy, Identity, and the Media in the Rise and Fall of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors,” published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. The professor also has written an article on white supremacist movements, “Fearing Hate: Reexamining the Media Coverage of the Christian Identity Movement,” which appeared in the Journal for the Study of Radicalism.

Professor Bailey is currently at work on two books, a collection of international myths and a textbook on African American religious history.

Professor Robert Andre LaFleur is Professor of History and Anthropology at Beloit College in Wisconsin, where he has taught since 1998. He received his doctorate from The University of Chicago's John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, where he combined work in anthropology, history, and Chinese literature. Professor LaFleur received the Charles S. Bassett Teaching Award from Colby College, as well as the James R. Underkofler Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award from Beloit College. He is the recipient of a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and has been a frequent visiting scholar with the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research in the Humanities and the East-West Center in Honolulu. In 2013, Professor LaFleur gave a series of lectures and seminars at Beijing University. Professor LaFleur is the lead author and editor of two textbooks: China: A Global Studies Handbook and Asia in Focus: China. He has published book chapters, articles, and research papers about topics ranging from Chinese historiography, literature, ethnicity, and mythology to the history and anthropology of Oceania. Professor LaFleur's current work combines historical research using Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sources with anthropological fieldwork on each of China's five sacred mountains.