Brian K. Pennington

Pennington has been a member of the religion faculty at Maryville College since 1998. He teaches courses in Hinduism, the culture and history of South Asia, and the study of religion. He conducts research on religion in colonial India, Hindu-Christian encounter, and also writes about method and theory in the study of religion. His first book, Was Hinduism Invented?: Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), is a study of Hindu-Christian interaction in the the late eighteenth and early nineteenth ceturies; it was reissued in paperback in 2007. His second book, the edited volume Teaching Religion and Violence, will be published by Oxford University Press later this year. Along with Amy Allocco, he is currently developing a third book, Ritual Innovation in South Asia. Pennington has published articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.

Pennington is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Religion and of its Executive Committee, he serves on the Board of Directors of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies and on the Advisory Council of the Conference on the Study of Religions of India, and he is former President of the American Academy of Religion Southeast Region.