Our Souls, Our Selves: Race and the Religious Imagination in U.S. Cinema
Jane Naomi Iwamura
Jane Naomi Iwamura is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of the West. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Asian American religions, race, and popular culture in the United States, with a specialized emphasis on visual culture and Japanese American lived religions. She is the author of Virtual Orientalism: Religion and Popular Culture in the U.S. (Oxford, 2011) and co-editor of Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (Routledge, 2003). Her scholarship has appeared in journals, including American Quarterly and Amerasia Journal.
Iwamura co-founded the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), where she serves as a Co-PI and Project Director. She also sits on the National Editorial Board of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.
Iwamura holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, bringing a rich background in philosophy, cultural studies, and religious history to her work.
Dr. Iwamura's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies at CMC.