Thomas A. Tweed

Interests

Biography

Tom Tweed taught at the University of Miami for five years and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1993 to 2008, where he was Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Zachary Smith Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies and adjunct professor of American Studies. In Fall 2008, he moved to The University of Texas at Austin, where he is Shive, Lindsay, and Gray Professor of Religious Studies. Tweed’s historical, ethnographic, and theoretical research, which includes six books and a six-volume series of historical documents, has been supported by several grants and fellowships, including three from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He edited Retelling U.S. Religious History (California, 1997) and co-edited Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (Oxford, 1999), which Choice named an "outstanding academic book." He also wrote The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (1992; UNC, 2000) and Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (Oxford, 1997), which won the American Academy of Religion's Award for Excellence. Tweed's Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion was published by Harvard University Press in 2006, and his most recent book is an historical study of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, which appeared in 2011 as America's Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation's Capitol (Oxford).