Joel W. Martin

Joel W. Martin, Professor & Costo Endowed Chair holder, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Religious Studies, History
Office: HMNSS Bldg. 2618
Phone: (909) 787-2137
Fax: (909) 787-3324
E-mail: joel.martin@ucr.edu
http://history.ucr.edu/faculty/martin.html

Degrees

PhD History of Religions and Southern History 1988 Duke University
MTh Theological Studies 1982 Harvard University
BA 1979 Birmingham-Southern College

Awards

NEH Fellowship for College and University Professors, 1995
Outstanding Book (Sacred Revolt) on the Subject of Human Rights in the U.S. by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights (1991)

Research Areas

Native American history and religion; the study of contact and colonialism; religion and film

Publications

Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees' Struggle for a New World, Boston: Beacon Press, (1991)
Screening the Sacred: Religion, Mythology and Ideology in Popular American Film,
     eds. Joel W. Martin and Conrad Ostwalt, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, (1995)
"The Scholarship of Cultural Contact: Decolonizing Native American History," a Special Issue of
     Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 21, guest eds. Joel W. Martin and M. Annette Jaimes, (1995)
Native American Religion, New York: Oxford University Press, (1999).
     Reprinted in paperback as The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (Oxford, 2001).

Former Institutions

Franklin and Marshall College

Biography

Joel Martin grew up in Opelika, a small town in Alabama, not far from the battlefield where Muskogee Indians fought Andrew Jackson's invasionary army in 1814. In his youth, he heard a lot about the American Civil War and, not coincidentally, experienced firsthand the ideological contests swirling around and within the modern civil rights movement. Martin studied philosophy and religion at Birmingham-Southern College, German at Essens Universität, and theology at Harvard Divinity School and later Harvard University. After receiving his doctorate in Religion and History at Duke University, he taught for a dozen years at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In 2000, Martin joined the Departments of History and Religious Studies at UCR.

Martin’s research recovers how different peoples responded to contact and colonialism in America and interprets how the memory or suppression of this history relates to power, defines communities, and shapes narratives, art, and politics. He is currently researching the lives of New Englanders and Cherokees involved in an early mission, writing a book on landmarks of American religious history, and directing an editorial project dealing with Native America. Martin is directing collaborative projects that will produce an annotated bibliography of Luiseño culture and history, a large website to support California Native Studies, and a multi-volume encyclopedia on Native American History and Culture.