Donovan Schaefer

Donovan Schaefer serves as Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts & Sciences, with secondary appointments as Core Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, Secondary Faculty at the Annenberg School for Communication, and membership in the Comparative Literature Graduate Group. His interdisciplinary work bridges religious studies, affect theory, and material culture, examining how feeling shapes knowledge production across secular and religious contexts.

Schaefer earned his B.A. from the University of British Columbia in Religion, Literature, and the Arts, followed by M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Religion from Syracuse University. His academic trajectory includes a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Haverford College and three years as a lecturer at the University of Oxford before joining Penn in 2017.

His research centers on embodiment, affect, and power in religion and secularism, with key contributions including the development of "cogency theory" to dismantle the thinking/feeling binary. He investigates how material culture, race, gender, and empire intersect with secular formations, particularly through historical case studies of scientific practice and institutional spaces. His work consistently challenges conventional boundaries between science, religion, and emotion.

Recent publications (2022-2025) demonstrate sustained engagement with the affective dimensions of secular knowledge production, analyzing contexts from university spaces to cemeteries and animal laboratories. These works reveal how racialized and gendered emotions underpin seemingly rational systems, while tracing the emotional logics of conspiracy theories, climate denialism, and New Atheism through historical and contemporary lenses.

Schaefer's scholarly impact is recognized through major awards:

• Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science (2023)
• International Society for Science and Religion book prize (2023)
• Finalist for the American Academy of Religion's Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (2023)

His influential books—Religious Affects (2015), The Evolution of Affect Theory (2019), and award-winning Wild Experiment (2022)—establish him as a leading theorist in affect studies and secularism research, with public scholarship appearing in The Conversation and The Immanent Frame.