Contact Information
3092E Foreign Language Building
707 South Mathews
Urbana, Illinois 61801
Research Interests
U.S. Religious History
Research Description
Professor Ebel's research program involves religion and war, religion and violence, and lay theologies of economic hardship all within the American context. His most recent book, From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California (NYU, 2023) examines the federal migratory farm labor camp system established in California during the Great Depression, as a site of missionary interaction between New Deal reformers and Dust Bowl migrants. He is also the author of G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion (Yale, 2015), Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War (Princeton, 2010), and the co-editor of From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America (California, 2012). He is currently at work on a religious history of American warfare in five weapons.
Education
Ph.D. University of Chicago, 2004
B.A. Harvard University, 1993
Grants
Louisville Institute Sabbatical Grant for Researchers, 2014-2015
Courses Taught
REL 236: Religion, Violence, and America
REL 510: Graduate Intro to the Study of Religion
REL 134: Religion, Race, and Resistance
REL 436: Religion in the U.S., 1900-1941
REL 235: History of Religion in America
REL / PHIL 110: World Religions
REL 437: Religion and American Cinema
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Biomedical and Translational Sciences
Honors & Awards
President, American Society of Church History, 2023
Guggenheim Fellow, 2017-2018
Helen Corley Petit Scholar, 2012-2013
Conrad Humanities Scholar, 2015-2020
Highlighted Publications
Ebel, J. H. (2015). G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300176704.001.0001
Carlson, J. D., & Ebel, J. H. (Eds.) (2012). From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520271654.001.0001
Ebel, J. H. (2010). Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Soldier in the Great War. Princeton University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7rxrq
Recent Publications
Ebel, J. H. (2023). From Dust They Came: Government Camps and the Religion of Reform in New Deal California. (North American Religions). New York University Press.
Ebel, J. H. (2019). Poetry as Piety: Chaplain Thomas Coakley and the Cult of the American Soldier in the Great War. Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pieta, XXXII, 39-64.
Ebel, J. H. (2019). The Great War, the United States, and Just War Thought. In M. D. Hall, & J. D. Charles (Eds.), America and the Just War Tradition: A History of U.S. Conflicts University of Notre Dame Press.
Holscher, K., Ebel, J., Riess, J., Edmonds, J. L. T., Heo, A., & Kelman, A. Y. (2019). Forum: The Religious Situation, 1968 (Part 1). Religion and American Culture, 29(1), 1-35. https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2019.1
Ebel, J. (2018). Thou Shalt Kill: A Religious History of the Rifle and the Grenade in America's Great War . Soundings, 101(3), 238-254. https://doi.org/10.5325/soundings.101.3.0238