Manuel A. Vásquez
Associate Professor -
Neikirk Term Professor (2002-03)
UF Research Foundation Professor (2004-2006)

Religion in Latin America, Theory & Method, Religion among U.S. Latinos

Office: 107B Anderson Hall
Phone: (352) 392-1625
Email: mvasquez@religion.ufl.edu

Manuel A. Vásquez received his B.S. from Georgetown University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Temple University. His dissertation and first book, The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1998), explored the effects of democratization and late capitalism on grassroots progressive Catholicism in Brazil. The book received the 1998 award for excellence in the analytical-descriptive study of religion from the American Academy of Religion. Vasquez also co-edited (with Anna Peterson and Philip Williams), Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas (Rutgers University Press, 2001), based on a three-year long comparative research project on Catholic and evangelical Protestant congregations in Peru, El Salvador, and among Peruvians and Salvadorans in the U.S. This work was supported by a major grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Vasquez has received grants and fellowships from the Lilly Endowment and the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations. He is a member of several working groups on immigration, globalization, and religion at the Social Science Research Council.  His most recent publications include Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas (Rutgers University Press, 2003), which he co-authored with Marie Friedmann Marquardt, and Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America  (AltaMira 2005), co-edited with Karen Leonard, Alex Stepick, and Jennifer Holdaway. Globalizing the Sacred explores the interaction between religion and globalizing processes, such as transnational migration, the growth of computer mediated communications and mass media, and the transition from Fordism to flexible capitalist accumulation, while Immigrant Faiths assesses the impact of post-1965 migration on the religious arena in the U.S. Currently, Vasquez is co-directing with Philip Williams a study on religious pluralism, space, and power among Brazilians, Mexicans, and Guatemalans in Florida, supported by the Ford Foundation. See www.latam.ufl.edu/fordproject/