Titles

• Senior Global Futures Scholar, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory
• Associate Professor, School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Biography

Dr. Jason Bruner is an ethnographer, writer, and historian studying Christians and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa and the United States. He is especially interested in lived religion, health, violence, and globalization. His work also incorporates photography and creative nonfiction.

He is currently working on a short book titled How to Study World Christianity, which will be completed in Spring 2022. He is also engaged in a multi-modal creative and documentary project on the metro-Phoenix area titled Life in the Valley.

Jason Bruner's most recent monograph, Imagining Persecution: Why American Christians Believe There is a Global War Against Their Faith (Rutgers University Press, 2021), provides a genealogy of American Christian discourses of global religious violence. It gives particular attention to the ways that religious persecution has come to frame American perceptions of Christianity worldwide. His first book, Living Salvation in the East African Revival in Uganda (University of Rochester Press, 2017), is a cultural history of a Christian revival movement in Uganda from the early 1930s to the mid 1950s. He is co-editing a book (with David C. Kirkpatrick) titled, Global Visions of Violence: Agency and Persecution in World Christianity. That book will be released with Rutgers University Press in 2022. 

Professor Bruner has collaborated with several colleagues at ASU and Northern Arizona University on an expansive comparative genocide studies project. This work has resulted in numerous historical and pedagogical publications. He serves on the board of Genocide Awareness Week, which will move from Scottsdale Community College to ASU in 2022. 

In addition to scholarly journal articles and book chapters, Dr. Bruner’s writing has appeared in publications such as the Oxford American, the Marginalia Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Religion Dispatches, Religion & Politics, and Sacred Matters. He has published creative nonfiction pieces at River Teeth, Image Journal, and The Revealer. His photography has appeared in Slag Glass City, Analog Cafe, and Gnu Journal. He collaborated with David Blakeman, a photographer, for a craft book on the canals and waterways in and around Phoenix, titled Sonoran Water (2021). 

He served as the Associate Head of Undergraduate Studies for Religious Studies from 2018-2021 and as Faculty Head of Religious Studies from the Fall of 2021.  

You can also follow his work on his personal website.