Faculty Directory
Dr. Brian Bennett
Louis Braille Home-Museum (Coupvray, France)
Professor of Religious Studies
- Contact:
- Send Email
- Phone:
- (716) 286-8454
Bio
Originally from San José, California, Dr. Bennett earned his B.A. summa cum laude from Princeton and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has taught at NU since 2001.
Bennett is a comparativist whose research examines the relationship between different religions, languages, and scripts.
In 2021 he received Niagara's inaugural Excellence in Scholarship Award.
Select publications:
- "Esperanto: One Language, Many Religions" (in Histoire culturelle de l'Europe, 2022)
- "Petropolis: The Place of Latin in Early Modern Russia" (in Language Dynamics in the Early Modern Period, Routledge, 2022)
- Sacred Languages of the World: An Introduction (Wiley, 2018) on Latin, Pali, Arabic, etc.
- Religion and Language in Post-Soviet Russia (Routledge, 2011) on Church Slavonic [церковнославянский язык]
Current project:
- "Braille Devotion" - religious uses of Braille in comparative perspective
Courses:
- REL 101 Introduction to Religion
- REL 206 World Religions
- REL 230 Monastery and Megachurch
- REL 250 Comparative Religion
- REL 280 Hieroglyphs to Hashtags
- REL 399 Topic: Cults
- REL 399 Topic: Godless Utopia