Hackett Receives Emerita Status

Rosalind I. J. Hackett, a longstanding faculty member who taught in the department from 1986-2021, was recently awarded Professor Emerita status. Hackett served as head of the department from 2009-2018. She taught courses on African religions, anthropology of religion, comparison of world religions, religion, conflict, and peace, sound, music, and the study of religion, and religion and nonprofit leadership. Hackett continues to teach our course on religion and nonprofit leadership and led a successful Religion and Nonprofit Leadership Symposium last spring.

Hackett’s emerita status was conferred in recognition of her many accomplishments. She published extensively in the areas of indigenous religion, new religious movements, gender, art, human rights, and conflict in Africa. Her most recent book is Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North: Senses, Media, Presence (Amsterdam UP, in press—coedited with Carola Lorea). She has worked actively throughout her career to promote the academic study of religion on an international scale. She was a founding member of the African Association for the Study of Religions (AASR) in 1992; from 2005-2015, she served as president of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), and was elected an honorary life member in 2015. From 2014-20, she served as vice president of the International Council on Philosophy and Human Sciences (CIPSH), associated with UNESCO. She is a board member and program coordinator of the African Consortium on Law and Religion Studies (ACLARS). In 2014-15, she was a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School and research associate in the Women's Studies in Religion program. For the fall semester 2018, Hackett was the Gerardus van der Leeuw Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. In 2019, she was named as a Chancellor’s Professor and now enjoys the status of Chancellor’s Professor Emerita. She also holds a visiting appointment as extraordinary professor, at the Desmond Tutu Centre for Religion and Social Justice, University of the Western Cape, South Africa.