Biography
Professor Bauman grew up in eastern Pennsylvania before going to Goshen College, in Northern Indiana, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree. After college, Professor Bauman went to Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) and earned both an M.Div. and Ph.D. degree, while teaching courses on Buddhism and Islam at PTS, Princeton University, and The College of New Jersey.

Contributions
Professor Bauman’s earliest research focused on the interaction of low-caste Christians and Hindus in colonial Chhattisgarh. His book on the topic, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868-1947 (Eerdmans Publishers, 2008) won the prize for Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies, 2006-2008, from the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. During this time period, Professor Bauman also conducted research on Sathya Sai Baba, a popular, miracle-working Indian guru with an international following that extends even to the city of Indianapolis. 

From 2008 to 2019, Professor Bauman conducted research on Hindu-Christian conflict. His most recent book, published by Cornell University Press, is Anti-Christian Violence in India, and earlier he published a book on the same topic with specific reference to Pentecostals and the public controversies surrounding conversion (called Pentecostals, Proselytization, and anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India). Both this book and a volume he co-edited with Richard Fox Young (Constructing Indian Christianities) were named as prize finalists for the Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies (History/Ethnography), 2013-17, by the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. 

In 2020, he co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations with Michelle Voss Roberts, and in 2024, he co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Megachurches with Afe Adogame, Damaris Parsitau, and Jeaney Yip.

His future projects will likely focus on religion and the law in Asia, and on the experiences and treatment of Hindu minorities in predominantly Christian countries.

Butler Teaching Assignment 

Professor Bauman teaches introductory surveys of the world’s religions as well as upper-level courses on Hinduism and Buddhism. He has recently taught topical courses such as “Religion, ‘Cults,’ and (In)Tolerance in America,” “Religion, Politics and Conflict in South Asia,” “Religion, Gender, and the Goddess in Asia,” “Race and Religion in America,” and “Theory and Method in the Study of Religion.” 

Melissa Etzler received her Ph.D. in German with a Designated Emphasis in Film from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014 and her M.A. in German from California State University, Long Beach. Her dissertation, Writing from the Periphery: W. G. Sebald and Outsider Art, explores intersections of pathology, marginalization, creative production and politics. While her areas of specialization include contemporary German Film and visual culture as well as crime and psychology in 18th – 21st century literature; Melissa is equally passionate about foreign language pedagogy. In addition to her courses in German language and culture, Melissa also teaches in the Core Curriculum (FYS) on Breaking Bad, focusing on crime, madness and surveillance in German and American texts and Stranger Things, which analyzes the Weird Fiction genre and 1980s culture.

Awards:

2018-2019 Outstanding Professor of the Year Award for Teaching

2018 College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Outstanding Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching

2018 AATG Indiana Post-Secondary Teacher of the Year

Publications:

Edited Volume

With Gabriele Maier. Outreach Strategies and Innovative Teaching Approaches for German Programs, Routledge, 2021.

With Priscilla Layne. Rebellion and Revolution: Defiance in German Language, History and Art, Cambridge Scholars, 2010.

Refereed Article

“Pernicious Plants: Imitation and Uncanny Ecocritical Thought in Gustav Meyrink’s ‘Die Pflanzen des Dr. Cinderella.’” German Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 459-475.

Book Chapters

“Zombies in the Age of Digital Reproduction – Marvin Kren’s Rammbock: Berlin Undead,” edited by Carrie Collenberg-Gonzalez and Martin Sheehan, Berghahn Books (forthcoming)

“‘Mothered by the Arid Sand’: Hanns Heinz Ewers’ Alraune with an Ecofeminist Twist.” Ecofeminist Science Fiction:International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature, edited by D.A. Vakoch, Routledge, 2021.

With Michelle Stigter-Hayden. “Branching Out with STEM inthe German Classroom.” Outreach Strategies and Innovative Teaching Approaches for German Programs, ed. by Melissa Etzler and Gabriele Maier, Routledge, 2021, pp. 172-88. 

“Peripheral Writing: Psychosis and Prose from Ernst Herbeck to W. G. Sebald.” Literature and Psychology: Writing, Trauma and the Self, edited by Önder Çakırtaş, Cambridge Scholars, 2019, pp. 18-48.

“So ein langes Leben. Rebellious Writing and Philosophical Meanderings in Sebald’s Juvenilia.” Über W. G. Sebald. Beiträge zu einem anderen Bild des Autors [On W. G. Sebald: The Author from a Different Point of View], edited by Uwe Schütte, de Gruyter, 2016, pp. 29-50.

Author of a couple of novels,  The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson and Do Not Go On. Co-author (with Sarah Layden) of The Invisible Art of Literary Editing. Editor of a few anthologies, My Name was Never Frankenstein: And Other Classic Adventure Tales Reanimated and An Indiana Christmas. Co-editor (with Michael Martone) of the anthology, Winesburg, Indiana. Stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere, including New Stories from the Midwest and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Wishes he was a hawk, believes that breakfast burritos are the perfect food. 

Zachary Scarlett is an assistant professor of modern Chinese history. He works on Maoist politics and culture. His current manuscript project focuses on the Chinese Communist Party’s understanding of radical political movements in the 1960s. He is specifically interested in how the Communist Party and the Red Guards incorporated events like the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam war protests, and other revolutionary activism into everyday political discourse. He conducted research for the project in Beijing from 2010 to 2011, which was supported by a Fulbright grant. Professor Scarlett is also broadly interested in the Global Sixties. He is the co-editor of The Third World in the Global 1960s, which examines radical social movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Outside of his research, Professor Scarlett teaches classes on modern China, East Asia, the Cold War, and environmental history. He received his Ph.D. from Northeastern University in 2013. 

Lynne A. Kvapil, known by her students as Dr. K, is an archaeologist specializing in ancient Greece and Aegean Prehistory. Her research focuses on the Mycenaean Greeks, particularly farming, warfare, the manufacture of ceramics, and labor organization and management. As an active field archaeologist, Dr. K travels to Greece every summer, where she is the Assistant Director of the Nemea Center of Archaeology Excavations at the Mycenaean cemetery at Aidonia and the Petsas House Excavations at Mycenae. Dr. K has been awarded research funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mediterranean Archaeological Trust to support her ongoing research on the Mycenaean Greeks, and she has been a part of a successful grant-writing team that has been awarded funding from the Archaeological Institute of America and the Loeb Foundation to support the excavations at Aidonia.

At Butler University, Dr. K teaches in all aspects of the ancient Mediterranean world, but most often she teaches about Ancient Greece, including Ancient Greek language courses, Ancient Greek Art and Myth, Ancient Greek Perspectives. She also teaches upper level courses in Ancient Greek and Roman Art and Architecture and Women in Antiquity. Dr. K is also a co-director of the Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and Classics (AMCA) lab, which won a 2015 Butler University Innovation Grant and which aims to help put the material culture of the ancient world into the modern classroom.

Biography
Professor Bauman grew up in eastern Pennsylvania before going to Goshen College, in Northern Indiana, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree. After college, Professor Bauman went to Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) and earned both an M.Div. and Ph.D. degree, while teaching courses on Buddhism and Islam at PTS, Princeton University, and The College of New Jersey.

Contributions
Professor Bauman’s earliest research focused on the interaction of low-caste Christians and Hindus in colonial Chhattisgarh. His book on the topic, Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 1868-1947 (Eerdmans Publishers, 2008) won the prize for Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies, 2006-2008, from the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. During this time period, Professor Bauman also conducted research on Sathya Sai Baba, a popular, miracle-working Indian guru with an international following that extends even to the city of Indianapolis. 

From 2008 to 2019, Professor Bauman conducted research on Hindu-Christian conflict. His most recent book, published by Cornell University Press, is Anti-Christian Violence in India, and earlier he published a book on the same topic with specific reference to Pentecostals and the public controversies surrounding conversion (called Pentecostals, Proselytization, and anti-Christian Violence in Contemporary India). Both this book and a volume he co-edited with Richard Fox Young (Constructing Indian Christianities) were named as prize finalists for the Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies (History/Ethnography), 2013-17, by the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. 

In 2020, he co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Hindu-Christian Relations with Michelle Voss Roberts, and in 2024, he co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Megachurches with Afe Adogame, Damaris Parsitau, and Jeaney Yip.

His future projects will likely focus on religion and the law in Asia, and on the experiences and treatment of Hindu minorities in predominantly Christian countries.

Butler Teaching Assignment 

Professor Bauman teaches introductory surveys of the world’s religions as well as upper-level courses on Hinduism and Buddhism. He has recently taught topical courses such as “Religion, ‘Cults,’ and (In)Tolerance in America,” “Religion, Politics and Conflict in South Asia,” “Religion, Gender, and the Goddess in Asia,” “Race and Religion in America,” and “Theory and Method in the Study of Religion.”