Carol Lowery Delaney

My original fieldwork, conducted in a Turkish village, explored the intertwined relationship of gender and religion through a theory of procreation and resulted in The Seed and The Soil (1991). My next project explored this theory in the Biblical and Qur'anic texts, focusing on the foundation story in the monotheistic religions, of Abraham and the sacrifice of the child (Abraham on Trial: the Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, 1998). My current project is exploring Columbus's apocalyptic religious beliefs. A programmatic article, "Columbus's Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem" was published in Comparative Studies in Society and History. In addition, I have written Investigating Culture, based on the pedagogy of a freshman seminar I developed that utilizes the experience of entering the university as an analogy to that of anthropologists entering another culture, helping students become aware of the constructed nature of culture.