Isobel Johnston
Assistant Adjunct Professor
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Isobel Johnston
Assistant Adjunct Professor
Ph.D. Religious Studies, Arizona State University
In addition to teaching the UNIFI General Education course Religions of the World, I have also taught classes on Religion in America, and Religion and Globalization. As an anthropologist of religion, my courses engage students with larger patterns in cultural change, Specifically how change in wider culture creates change in religious spaces and how religious spaces are in constant dialogue with all aspects of culture. As a scholar of contemporary ritual practices, my courses include a strong grounding in how people do religion as well as how they think religiously.
As a ritual studies scholar of contemporary American Judaism, my work examines how individuals experience daily life rituals and how they interpret these experiences to make both personal meaning and to cultivate their identities as Jews. She has published an article on contemporary Jewish menstrual rituals, Niddah as Index of Jewish Sexuality: a theoretical foundation for an anthropology of menstrual rituals; and is currently working on a book unpacking themes of purity, suffering, and healing in Jewish women’s narratives healing through the ritual of full-bodied immersion in water (mikvah tevillah). Future research plans to investigate Jewish men’s mikvah narratives to identify whether their slightly different ritual immersion process creates different experiences of immersion that in turn generate different interpretations of purity.