UC Press Blog

UC Press is pleased to be the new publisher for the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. You can read the journal's newest issue—the first published by UC Press—as well as all back issues of the journal, on JRPC's new website. We're delighted to be working with JRPC's editorial team and would like to take this opportunity to introduce JRPC's editor, David Feltmate, to our blog readers.

David Feltmate is Professor of Sociology at Auburn University at Montgomery. He researches and writes about religion and humor in American mass media and also has interests in religion and music, sociology of religion, cults and new religious movements, and social theory. He is the author of two books, Drawn to the Gods: Religion and Humor in The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy (New York University Press, 2017) and Religion and Humour: An Introduction (Routledge, 2024). In addition to editing the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture he is the series editor for Wiley’s series in Religion and Popular Culture and co-chair of the Religion and Popular Culture Unit in the American Academy of Religion. He is currently editing volumes on methods in the study of religion and humor and religion and heavy metal music. His next project will be a study of how religious standup comedians use humor to create religious worlds.

We sat down with David Feltmate to get to know him a little better and to ask him about his aims for the journal.

Tell us about yourself and your research interests.

I am interested in any place in our world where people make claims about how unseen things place moral regulations upon us and then convince others to act according to those standards. Whether that is gods, ghosts, markets, or ideologies, I love looking at how we convince each other that we have specialized knowledge about the very nature of a reality and that only by being a special kind of person or select group member can you really understand the forces that hold our lives in the balance. While governments and institutions like state religious bodies are frequently treated as the legitimate places to study these forces, I am interested in the ways that everyday people leverage the communication technologies of their day to shape these forces and craft their own interpretations about the unseen orders that tell us who we are, how we are to act, and what we are supposed to become—hence my interest in popular culture. Those moral imperatives have become even more important and fascinating to me in recent years, although I am still in the process of thinking through how to explain their significance.

What drew you to the editorship of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture?

I have been a Co-general Editor since 2017 when the Journal was with University of Toronto Press and so now I am moving into a new role as Editor-in-Chief with the move to University of California Press. I initially became an editor to help guide the field, but it became a lot of work to just keep the journal going over the last few years. The move has given me new life to reimagine what the journal can be and to build a team that will help to develop the journal in new and vibrant ways.

What are those new and vibrant ways you want to develop the journal?

JRPC has always been a place where people who are writing about religion and popular culture can place their research, and that will not change, but we are going to be much more intentional about actively developing a research agenda for the field. A lot of research that the journal has published in the past has been interesting articles, but the field of religion and popular culture has been in existence for twenty-five years now and it has not taken active steps to aggressively state and develop research questions and agendas particular to its own needs and interests. The biggest things that I have noticed as an editor is that people do not see their work contributing to a larger body of research in religion and popular culture studies, so the journal will be actively working to establish that scholarly conversation and contributors will be directed to contribute to those collective discussions in meaningful ways. I am preparing an editorial that will outline the kinds of questions that I think scholars will answer in ways that promote a collective conversation about why religion, popular culture, and their intersection matters for scholars in the broader study of religion. 

I am also in the process of adding associate editors, with Dr. Francis Stewart of the University of Stirling is the first to sign on. I am actively seeking out collaborators whom I know will disagree with me and write those disagreements out for our readers. I have great love and respect for scholars who care about ideas and their implications enough to disagree with each other and leave a record for subsequent generations of scholars to follow. I see the journal incorporating more editorials and essays designed to make disagreements explicit for participants in the field. Our editorial board will also be developing materials to help guide new scholars to the field so that they can get up to speed on our collective body of knowledge. 

My biggest hope is that in the coming years the journal will become an archive of a lively conversation that continues to produce new research and that people will want to read every article in each issue because there will be obvious conversations that people can follow.

Where can people submit their manuscripts?

Please submit your manuscripts through Scholastica here: https://app.scholasticahq.com/submissions/jrpc/new.