Dr. Christopher Douglas
Position
Contact
Credentials
BA (UBC), MA and PhD (Toronto)
Area of expertise
Literature and Religion; Bible as Literature; Contemporary American Fiction
Christopher Douglas teaches literature and religion, the Bible as Literature, and contemporary American fiction.
Dr. Douglas's primary research interests include the contemporary religious imagination in American literature. His current research is on the problems of suffering and evil in contemporary American novels – both serious literary fiction and evangelical fiction. He uses historical Bible scholarship to understand the ways that ancient genres and divine characters shape contemporary fiction and politics. This project is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant.
Recent publications include “, “” and “.” He has guest-edited special issues of Christianity & Literature on “” and of Post-45 on “”
His most recent work on Marilynne Robinson includes “” and “.”
His latest book, , shows how American writers struggled to understand and respond to the unexpected emergence of the Christian Right in the United States. Literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right's strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism — leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian Multiculturalism" and “Christian Postmodernism.” This project was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Standard Research Grant.
He regularly teaches English 232, 233, 386, and 481.
Find/follow Chris:
Selected Faculty Publications
“.” Journal of American Culture 47 (2024)
“.” Literature and Theology 37: 2 (June 2023)
“” Special issue of Post45 Contemporaries. September 2022. With Matthew Mullins.
“Silence: Kidnapping, Abuse, and Murder in Early Twenty First Century White Evangelical Fiction.” Literature and Religious Experience. Bloomsbury, 2022.
“.” Religions 2022
“.” Christianity & Literature. Volume 71, Number 2, June 2022
“Public Scholarship in the Age of the Christian Right.” . Amherst College Press, 2021
“”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion (4 May 2020)
“.”
Christianity & Literature Volume 69, Number 1 (March 2020): 1-14.
“”
Tijdschriftframe 32:1 (June 2019)
“.”
Christianity & Literature 67:3 (May 2018): 548–558.
“.”
The Review of Faith & International Affairs (Mar 2018): 61-73.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016
The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields. Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria Anzaldúa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.
In Religion & Literature 45:2 (Summer 2013; published Fall 2014): 83 - 107
American Literary History 26:1 (Spring 2014): 132-153.
Modern Fiction Studies 59.4 (Winter 2013): 784-810.
Novel 44: 3 (Fall 2011): 333-353.
"Gaps and Margins: Sociology and Assimilation in Jade Snow Wong and John Okada."
Chapter 43 of Asian American Literature, vol. 2. Edited by David Leiwei Li. Routledge, 2012.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009
American Library Association 2009 Outstanding Academic Title
The first 'unified field theory' of multicultural literature, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism is a literary history of how we arrived at our current paradigm of writing, reading and teaching multicultural literature in the United States. It hypothesizes a three-phase development for multicultural literature from the 1920s to the 1980s, uncovering the largely unacknowledged role that social science ideas played in nourishing the politics and forms of the most canonical writers in the African American, Asian American, Mexican American and Native American traditions. A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism challenges the critical consensuses on the four traditions that treat each in terms of separate histories, a critical practice that has obscured the parallel phases of each tradition and the common cultural politics that generated multiculturalism's rupture with the non-pluralist literary politics that came before it.
Reciting America: Culture and Cliche in Contemporary U.S. Fiction
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001
American Literature 78: 1 (March 2006): 141-168. Reprinted in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. Harold Bloom. Updated edition. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2007. 209-232.
"Reading Ethnography: the Cold War Social Science of Jade Snow Wong's Fifth Chinese Daughter and Brown v. Board of Education."
Public Scholarship
“.” The Conversation. March 17, 2024.
“.” Feb 23, 2023. Religion Dispatches.
“.” Jan 4, 2022. The Conversation.
“.” July 6, 2021. Religion Dispatches.
“.” May 14, 2020. The Conversation.
“.” April 2, 2020. Religion Dispatches
January 11, 2019. Marginalia.
“” June 29, 2018. Religion Dispatches / Rewire.News.
“.” Christianity & Literature 67.3 (June 2018).
“” May 14, 2018. Religion Dispatches.
“.” March 11, 2018. The Conversation.
“.” Feb 21, 2018. Cambridge Institute on Religion & International Studies.
“.” November 10, 2017. The Conversation.
“” September 18, 2017. Religion Dispatches.
“” August 9, 2017. Religion Dispatches.
June 15, 2017. Religion Dispatches.
April 25, 2017. Religion Dispatches.
March 17 2017. Marginalia.
February 23, 2017. Religion Dispatches.
August 29, 2016. Marginalia.
June 8, 2016. Religion Dispatches.