Omri Elisha (Ph.D., New York University) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens College, CUNY. He has been a Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, and is a current member of the Young Scholars in American Religion workshop at the Center for Religion and American Culture in Indianapolis. In 2009, he was awarded the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Cultural Horizons Prize. Elisha’s first book, Moral Ambition: Mobilization and Social Outreach in Evangelical Megachurches, was published in 2011 by University of California Press.
Elisha’s research focuses on cultural practices that evangelical Protestants use to promote evangelism and Christian he is currently interested in local ministries that emphasize the role of the arts, especially dance and other performance genres, in relation to a form of religious engagement known as “spiritual warfare.” Visuality and visibility are essential notions in this worldview, both because of the “spiritual sight” needed to discern the presence of immaterial forces at work in the world, and because of the significance of visual aesthetics and techniques of embodiment that mediate prophetic inspiration.
