 Professor Dale Stover
Professor Emeritus, taught in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at UNO since 1968. He received his B.A. degree (1957) from Washington University in St. Louis. He earned Bachelor of Divinity (B.D., 1961) and Master of Sacred Theology (S.T.M., 1964) degrees from Andover Newton Theological School in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. He took his Ph.D. degree (1967) in Religious Studies at McGill University in Montreal.
Professor Stover’s early research focused on hermeneutics as the methodological key to interpreting religious texts for contemporary understanding. In 1976 he studied modern religious meanings as affected by the European Enlightenment through a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer fellowship at Yale University under the tutelage of Professor Hans Frei. In the fall of 1979 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago where he studied with the Islamics scholar, Professor Fazlur Rahman of the Oriental Institute. In the summer of 1980 he was again a summer NEH fellow, and he studied the nexus of anthropology and psychoanalytic theory with Professor Melford Spiro at the University of California at San Diego. In the fall of 1981, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California in Berkeley where he studied Shi’i Islam with Professor Hamid Algar.
In the fall of 1982 Professor Stover took a leave of absence to apprentice with healers practicing non-allopathic medicine in California. This initiated a turn toward experiential studies in religion, partly displacing and partly complementing his earlier focus on textual studies. In the fall of 1985, his concern with experiential religion led him to participation in ceremonies of indigenous peoples. His primary teachers in traditional indigenous ceremonies have been the members of the Has No Horse family of the Wakpamni Lake community on Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.
In the fall of 1992 Professor Stover became the Coordinator of the new Native American Studies program at UNOmaha and he served as coordinator for three years. Since 1991 he has served on the faculty of the Women’s Studies program at UNOmaha. He also serves as an adjunct professor in the Department of Preventive and Societal Medicine in the College of Medicine at UNMC and as a fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies based at UNL. . His recent publications are "Postcolonial Sun Dancing at Wakpamni Lake," which appeared in the December 2001 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion; “Sun Dance,” which is included in The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains (2004); “Lakota Sun Dance,” which can be found in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005); and “Symbolism in American Indian Ritual and Ceremony,” which is published in American Indian Religious Traditions: An Encyclopedia (2005).
Dr. Stover's email address is dstover@mail.unomaha.edu.
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