Faculty Fellows

Dr. Anne-Marie Schultz is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. She specializes in Greek Philosophy, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Pedagogy, and Augustine. Her research interests also include philosophy and literature, feminism, and Nietzsche. Her current work includes a recent book publication, Plato’s Socrates as Narrator: A Philosophical Muse. Visit her blog Teaching Yoga and Philosophy.

Dr. Jerry M. (Mark) Long teaches in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core. A former intelligence analyst and Middle East area specialist in the Air Force, Dr. Long’s research focus has been the narrative of Islamic fundamentalists and ways in which U.S. national security policies can counter it. His most recent publication is “ISIS and the Collapse of the ‘Caliphal Syllogism’” in Special Operations Journal (November 2018). His next research project will examine similarities between white nationalist manifestos and that of jihadists.

Dr. Michael-John DePalma teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric, spiritual writing, creative nonfiction, persuasive writing, professional writing, and composition theory and pedagogy. His research centers on religious rhetorics, transfer, and rhetorical education. With Jeffrey M. Ringer, he edited Mapping Christian Rhetorics: Connecting Conversations, Charting New Territories (Routledge 2015). Mapping Christian Rhetorics was awarded the 2015 Book of the Year by the Religious Communication Association. His current book project is entitled Reshaping Sacred Rhetorical Education: Austin Phelps and the Teaching of Sermon Writing at Andover Theological Seminary, 1848-1879.

We are very pleased Dr. DePalma has joined us a Better Together BU Faculty Fellow. He recently hosted a conference in October 2018 in Knoxville, TN, Rhetoric and Religion in the 21st Century: Possibilities, Publics, Partnerships. His current research includes an upcoming publication in Rhetoric and Religion in the 21st Century titled, “Cultivating Interfaith Civic Activism: Rhetorical Education at Andover Settlement House.”

Dr. Candi K. Cann teaches World Cultures, Social World, World Religions, Death and Dying in World Religions, and Buddhism at Baylor University, and teaches in both the BIC and the Religion department. She received both her A.M. and Ph.D. in Comparative Religion from Harvard University, an M.A. in Asian Religions from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and a B.A. in Asian Studies and English from St. Andrews in North Carolina.

She is also Faculty-in-Residence at Texana House in North Village on Baylor’s campus.

We are very pleased Dr. Cann has joined us a Better Together BU Faculty Fellow, and we hope you will explore her research that focuses on death and dying, and the impact of remembering (and forgetting) in shaping how lives are recalled, remembered and celebrated. Dr. Cann’s last book, Virtual Afterlives: Grieving the Dead in the Twenty-first Century with the University Press of Kentucky (2014), centered on grief and memorialization in the contemporary world. Her next book, Dying to Eat: Cross Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death and the Afterlife (also with University Press of Kentucky, 2017), is an edited collection on the intersection of food in death and grief. For her newest book, WhiteOut (Indiana University Press, anticipated 2018), Dr. Cann is researching diversity in death, examining the whitening of the funeral industry and death studies, and arguing that the field of death and grief has been heavily influenced by white and Protestant worldviews.