Anderson Blanton, a 2011–12 CSAS postdoctoral fellow, has won a prestigious two-year grant from the Social Science Research Council to continue his research on the use of prayer cloths in the Pentecostal tradition. His project, “Prayer Cloths, or, the Materiality of Divine Communication,” is one of 28 projects to receive funding under the SSRC’s “New Directions in the Study of Prayer” program. This program, offered with support from the John Templeton Foundation, fosters research on the practice of prayer, encouraging interdisciplinary conversations among scholars who study prayer.
Blanton holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Columbia University. He earned a B.A. in cultural anthropology in 2002 from UNC-Chapel Hill. As a postdoc at the Center last year, he team-taught an introductory Southern Studies course (cross-listed with American Studies, Folklore, and Cultural Anthropology) on topics including the styles of sermons in the Pentecostal tradition, glossolalia, and theories of representation as related to the construction of everyday understandings of Appalachia. During the two-year SSRC fellowship, he will remain based at the Center while he pursues his research into a number of Independent Pentecostal church communities in northwestern Virginia.