Non-Resident Senior Scholar
Editor, IJRR Journal
Email William Swatos, Jr.
William Swatos Vitae
Dr. William H. Swatos, Jr. is Senior Fellow at ISR and Managing Editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, as well as Executive Officer of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and of the Religious Research Association. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology, with honors in social theory, from the University of Kentucky and also earned the M.Div. degree summa cum laude from the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Kentucky. Dr. Swatos is author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of over twenty books including the Encyclopedia of Religion and Society and with Kevin J. Christiano and Peter Kivisto, the widely used textbook Sociology of Religion: Contemporary Developments.
His early research was in the area of church-sect theory, particularly with respect to denominationalism, with a revision of his doctoral dissertation being published by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion as Into Denominationalism: The Anglican Metamorphosis. He also was a Fulbright lecturer and later published, with Loftur R. Gissurarson, Icelandic Spiritualism: Mediumship and Modernity in Iceland. In social theory, Dr. Swatos has had an abiding interest in the work of Max Weber, most recently exemplified in the collection he edited with Lutz Kaelber, in observance of the centennary of Weber’s innovation of the concept, The Protestant Ethic turns 100. His more recent empirical research has been in the area of pilgrimage and tourism, where he has published two volumes of collected studies.
