Tyler M. Tully

Supervisor/s:

Prof. Graham Ward (Oxon), Dr. Donovan O. Schaefer (University of Pennsylvania)

Research Overview:

Tyler's dissertation project, "Critical Materialisms: Power, Place, and Personhood in White and Black 'Red' Spaces," offers a theoretical intervention into the limits and assumptions of (post)humanist knowledge production in the mainstream study of religion and 'the secular' following critical Black and Native intellectual traditions.

Research Area/s: 

Indigenous ‘Religion’ and Native American Intellectual Traditions

Critical Race Studies

Secular Studies & Non-religion

Religion & Science

Decolonial & Anti-Colonial Studies

Gender and Sexuality Studies

About:

Tyler M. Tully is a doctoral candidate in religious studies and the Arthur Peacocke Graduate Scholar in Science and Religion at the University of Oxford. He is an Oklahoman of settler and Native (Chickasaw) descent whose interdisciplinary teaching and research engages intersecting entanglements between religion, race, gender, science, and colonialism. Tully earned a BA in Religious Studies and Theology from Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas before earning his M.Div. with Distinction from the Chicago Theological Seminary where his research thesis explored critical theories of trauma, affect, and animality. In 2020, he will be co-editor of a special issue on race and climate change in the international journal Politics.

Links:

Academia.edu: https://oxford.academia.edu/TylerMTully

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylertully/

Select Publications:

“Epistemological Sacrifice Zones and Decolonizing the Study of Religion.” Religious Studies Project. July 2020.

“Settler Similarity and the Science of Difference: Human Identity in an Age of DNA Testing,” The Religion Factor, University of Groningen. January 2019.

“Review of Brianne Donaldson’s Creaturely Cosmologies: Why Metaphysics Matters for Animal and Planetary Liberation.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 12(1): 109-111. March 2018.

“Epistemologies of Trauma: Cognitive insights for narrative construction as ritual performance,” in Bulletin for the Study of Religion 46, no. 3-4 (2017): 48-56.

“Decolonizing Eco-Methodologies,” in T&T Clark Companion to Ecological Theology, (forthcoming).

Conference Papers and Plenary Lectures: 

“Native Futurities in an Age of ‘Permanent Settler War’: Conceptualizing Settler Coloniality as an Ongoing Ecological Structure.” American Academy of Religion (2020), AAR Annual Meeting.

“The Extraction of Flesh in Trump’s America: Extending Environmental Racism beyond Toxic Encroachment.” American Academy of Religion (2019), AAR Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA.

“‘And the Word became flesh’: How deep is the Incarnation in light of biological evolution?” Reading is Believing? Sacred Texts in a Scientific Age, The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, University of Cambridge, UK (2018).

“Epistemologies of Trauma: Narrative (Re)Construction as Ritual Knowledge.” Annual Ways of Knowing: Graduate Conference on Religion, Harvard Divinity School, USA (2015).

Academic related Activities: 

In addition to his studies, Tyler has served as a peer reviewer for the academic journals Secularism and Nonreligion, the Journal for Critical Animal Studies and Perspectivas. Tyler is also a former elected member of the University of Oxford’s Faculty's Graduate Joint Consultative Committees, Oxford's First People's Collective, and the Oxford Graduate Theological Society. He is also a perpetual member of the Alpha Chi National Honor society, the North American Society for the Study of Religion, and the American Academy of Religion.

Funding:

Arthur Peacocke Graduate Scholar in Theology and Science Award, Exeter College, Oxford

Areas of Teaching Competence and Experience:

Theory & Method in the Study of Religion; Decolonial and Anti-Colonial Theory; Race, Religion, and Science; Trauma and Embodied Memory; Ritual and Ceremony; Religion and the Environment; Race, Space and Place in the Study of Religion; History of Christian Thought.

Courses Taught: 
  • “Religion and Religions” (University of Oxford, undergraduate)
  • “Theory and Method in the Study of Religion” (University of Oxford, undergraduate)
  • “Religious Ecologies & the New Materialisms” (University of Oxford, graduate reading seminar)
  • “God, Christ, and Salvation” (University of Oxford, undergraduate capstone seminar)
  • “Christian Rebels and Reformers” (University of the Incarnate Word, undergraduate)
  • “Global Perspectives on Jesus” (University of the Incarnate Word, undergraduate)