Rodger Payne
Associate Professor
Director of Religious Studies

124 Carmichael Hall
828.250.2397
rpayne@unca.edu

At the Pool of Abraham
Sanliurfa, Turkey
May 2007

Dr. Payne joined the faculty of UNCA at the beginning of the fall 2007 semester.  Prior to his arrival at UNCA, he was a member of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Louisiana State University, where he served as department chair from 2005 -2007.  He has also taught at the University of Virginia and at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia.

A native North Carolinian, Dr. Payne was born in western North Carolina but grew up in Charlotte and completed his BA in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  He earned his MTS degree from Harvard Divinity School in 1983, and his MA and Ph.D. at the University of Virginia.  His academic interests include religion in America in all its multitude of forms, but particularly religion in the South and American Catholicism.  He has taught a variety of courses, including comparative courses on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; American religious history; religion and culture in the South; and modern Catholicism.  He is currently a faculty member in the Department of History, where he offers courses in American religious history.

Dr. Payne’s initial research was in the nexus of religious experience and literary self-expression, and his book, The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism, was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1998.  He is the co-editor (with Dr. Walter Conser of UNC-Wilmington) of Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture, a collection of new and previously published articles about religion in the South (University Press of Kentucky, 2008).  In recent years, his research has focused upon Italian immigration and Catholic devotionalism in south Louisiana, and his articles on the devotion to St. Amico in Italy and Louisiana have appeared in various American and European publications.  “I am very interested in the public expression of religion in America,” he says, “whether this occurs in the form of an autobiographical text, through the procession of an image, or in various forms of popular culture such as music or even Elvis impersonation.  Such expressions tell us much more about the way in which most people live their religion day to day, which sometimes may be very different from the 'official' texts and tenets of a religion.”

Dr. Payne is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Southern Religion and a member of the American Academy of Religion, the American Society of Church History, and the American Catholic Historical Association.