Biography S. Brent Plate

S. Brent Plate is Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College, where his companion Edna Melisa Rodriguez also teaches and shares time with their daughters Sabina and Camila. His teaching and research are focused on how humans see, what we see, how our ways of seeing are culturally and religiously constructed, and how seeing is one behavior by which we make meaning of our worlds. This approach encompasses the "visual arts," but engages with the visual on a more fundamental and everyday basis: what we see in film, television, fashion, graphic design, urban planning, etc.

Book-length publications include Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (Wallflower, 2008), The Religion and Film Reader (co-edited with Jolyon Mitchell, Routledge, 2007), Blasphemy: Art that Offends (Black Dog Publishing, 2006), Walter Benjamin, Religion, and Aesthetics (Routledge, 2005), Re-Viewing the Passion: Mel Gibson's Film and Its Critics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Representing Religion in World Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Religion, Art, and Visual Culture (Palgrave/St. Martins, 2002), Imag(in)ing Otherness: Filmic Visions of Living Together (AAR-Scholars Press/Oxford UP, 1999). He has also published articles in journals such as Literature and Theology, Soundings, Cross Currents, Biblical Interpretation, and Postmodern Culture.

Plate is also Co-Founder and Managing Editor of the journal, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, Runner-Up for the 2006 Best New Scholarly Journal award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. The journal can be accessed via www.bergpublishers.com. He serves on various advisory boards including the board of International Society of Religion, Literature, and Culture; the journals Postscripts and Cross-Currents, and the Religion and Popular Culture book series published through Rowman & Littlefield.