Dr. Medovoi is Professor in the Department of English and Chair of the Program in Social, Cultural and Critical Theory. Among other topics, his research and teaching interests include: the historical co-determinations of religion and race, theories of political and economic theology, and the politics of secularism. He published Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke University Press, 2005) and has served as the Principal Investigator for two Mellon Foundation awards on the topics of “Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging” (2013-2016) and “Neoliberalism at the Neopopulist Crossroads" (2020-2022). With Elizabeth Bentley, he is co-editor of a collection also titled Religion, Secularism and Political Belonging (Duke University Press, 2021) that puts into dialogue the shifting politics of religion/secularism in North America, Europe, the Middle East and China.
He recently published The Inner Life of Race: Bodies, Souls and the History of Racial Power (Duke 2024), which argues that race is a technology of power whose history reveals it to have relied on theological concepts of evil and on religious techniques of governing spiritual threat.