about me
Bobby C. Alexander, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and Political Economy in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas. Dr. Alexander received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in Religious Studies; he also was awarded a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology by Union Theological Seminary in New York. Dr. Alexander was awarded a Master of Philosophy in Religious Studies by Columbia, and a Master of Divinity in Systematic Theology by Union Seminary. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Baylor University, from where he graduated magna cum laude. Dr. Alexander joined the UTD faculty in 1993 as Adjunct Lecturer in the formerly named School of Social Sciences before being appointed Senior Lecturer in that school and in the School of Arts and Humanities. Prior to joining the faculty, Dr. Alexander was Assistant Professor of Religious Studies in Dedman College at Southern Methodist University. Before that, he was Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Program in Religion in the Department of Philosophy at Hunter College of the City University of New York and, previously, Adjunct Faculty in the same program at Hunter College.
Professional Accomplishments in Original Investigation
Dr. Alexander is the author of two book monographs – originally published by the American Academy of Religion and currently in the catalog of Oxford University Press, articles in leading peer-reviewed journals in their fields, chapters in edited books, and entries in specialty and general encyclopedias. He has published in the fields of Religious Studies, social-scientific study of religion, ritual studies, and anthropology of religion. He has served as section editor of a volume on anthropology and editor of a special issue of a journal on religion and culture. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and a past member of its Ritual Studies Steering Committee. He has served as a reviewer for professional journals in social-scientific study of religion, ritual studies, and anthropology, and a book reviewer for journals in religion, anthropology, and the humanities. Dr. Alexander is a past recipient of a Junior Scholar Award presented by the AAR’s Southwest Commission on Religious Studies.
Dr. Alexander’s publications treat religion and social change. Informed by theories of religion and ritual as agents of social change found in sociology, anthropology, and religious studies, his research examines social change within the overlap of religion and other social arenas. A special focus has been ways in which minority and marginal social groups have engaged their religious institutions and ideologies as agents of social change within the context of broader societal patterns of change. Dr. Alexander employs participant-observation ethnography as his primary research method. Groups examined in previous research have included politically active blacks engaging their Pentecostal religion as protest in the service of civil rights, and the viewers of television religion engaging the TV programs as ritual in conflicting ways in an effort to redress their ideological and social marginalization in American society: establishing self-legitimacy as a minority religious group, and adapting to a secularized American society undergoing political, social, and cultural change.
A current project concentrates on immigrants seeking political asylum, including those who experienced persecution for their religious beliefs, and the performance of their credibility in the legal process of being granted asylum, which involves being selected for legal representation, preparing for a court hearing, and undergoing a hearing before an immigration judge. Dr. Alexander is collaborating with members of the UTD Asylum Research Team (ART), an interdisciplinary group comprised of faculty in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences. ART is carrying out the research in partnership with the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas (HRI), a Dallas-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides legal representation to clients pursuing asylum. Another current project focuses on Mexican immigrant women discovering in their Pentecostal religious institutions and ideology encouragement to change in gender roles inside the institutions they help to establish and lead, as well as change in gender roles inside their families. The project calls attention to change in gender roles in the overlapping social arenas of religious institutions – which sociological studies tend to overlook, the family, and paid labor, on which sociologists focus as the locus of change.
Dr. Alexander’s recently completed book – an ethnographic study of barriers Hispanic community college students experience in transferring to the university – is under contract to be published by Edwin Mellen Press and is currently in the stage of preparation of camera-ready pages. One of two editors of the book, Dr. Alexander wrote 59 percent of this multiple-authored work. The book is an expanded version of a paper he and his co-authors were selected by The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University to present to its eight-panel symposium on community colleges and educational opportunities for Hispanics supported by the Pew Hispanic Center.
The book is based upon a grant project funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), which Dr. Alexander served as Project Director. The purpose of the FIPSE grant was to address Congressional Priorities 12 and 13: retain Latino students enrolled in two-year colleges, transfer them to four-year colleges and universities upon the completion of the Associate’s degree, graduate them with a Bachelor’s from four-year institutions, and channel more Latino students into the sciences. The FIPSE grant funded a project in which UTD, the home institution of the grant, partnered with Mountain View College in the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) to offer a course in “Cultural Studies.” The course utilized an ethnographic field station to train Hispanic students at MVC to conduct ethnographic research on their family members’ levels of education, types of jobs, and other demographic characteristics. Upon the completion of the FIPSE project, Dr. Alexander initiated the DCCCD’s pursuing a new FIPSE grant building upon Dr. Alexander and his colleagues’ FIPSE project; the effort by the DCCCD was successful.
In the final year of the FIPSE grant, Dr. Alexander led an effort to secure a grant from the Dallas Women’s Foundation that enabled the FIPSE project principals to create a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization (the Oak Cliff Center for Community Studies) in order to to continue and expand the activities funded by the FIPSE grant. In his role as President of the Board of Directors of the OCCCS, Dr. Alexander secured two additional grants from the Dallas Women’s Foundation, two grants from the Harold Simmons Foundation, and one from TXU Electric to support the Oak Cliff Center.
Dr. Alexander’s research on performance of credibility in the pursuit of political asylum is being funded by a grant from the Overbrook Foundation (awarded through the Human Rights Initiative of North Texas). His research on religion and gender role change has been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and CrossCurrents: The Association for Religion and Intellectual Life. Dr. Alexander’s earlier research on television religion was funded by the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the AAR’s Southwest Commission on Religious Studies, and multiple grants from Southern Methodist University.
Dr. Alexander has presented numerous scholarly papers at annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and a paper at the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, co-sponsored by the American Anthropological Association and the American Academy of Religion. He has presented papers to scholarly symposia at Harvard University; Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden; and Southern Methodist University. Last year he presented the keynote address to a symposium on ritual construction of the experience of the “holy” in secular society attended by university faculty and graduate students as well as practicing performance artists in Cardigan, Wales, United Kingdom. In 2010 he will present an invited lecture to the same group.
Teaching
Dr. Alexander teaches research writing in sociology, a Core Course in UTD’s Sociology program required of undergraduate majors in Sociology, and a variety of elective undergraduate and graduate courses in sociology that draw students from across UTD’s degree programs. His courses include race and ethnicity; immigrants and immigration in U.S. society; and post-1965 immigrants and their religions in U.S. society. He supervises Independent Studies – at both the bachelor’s and Master’s levels, as well as the Senior Honor’s Thesis. He has been a member of a dissertation committee in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences and has served as Outside Chair for the Final Oral Examination of three Ph.D. candidates in the School of Arts and Humanities.
Dr. Alexander is a two-time recipient of the Student Choice Teaching Award presented by students in the School of Social Sciences at UTD. He was twice nominated by UTD students for the Chancellor’s Council Outstanding Teaching Award. He was a three-time nominee for the Margareta Deschner Teacher Award given by the Women’s Center at Southern Methodist University.Administration and Service
Dr. Alexander served as Assistant Dean and College Master in UTD’s School of Social Sciences. In that role he served as Chair of the Committee for Undergraduate Studies (CUS) in the school. He is currently a member of the Sociology Program Committee in the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Studies (EPPS). He has been a member of this school’s Ad Hoc Committee for Granting of Tenure and Promotion to the Rank of Associate Professor, and the Ad Hoc Committee for Mid-Probationary Tenure Review. He has served on the school’s graduate Examination Committee, and the Quality Teaching Committee in the School of Social Sciences.
Dr. Alexander is currently a member of UTD’s University Calendar Committee. He has been a member of UTD’s Committee on Education Policy (CEP), which he has served as Chair; the Committee on Core Curriculum (CCC); Committee on Student Scholarships, which he has served as Vice Chair; the Advisory Committee of the Office of International Education; the Council of Masters, comprised of Assistant and Associate Deans of Undergraduate Studies in their respective schools; the President’s Ad Hoc Committee for Community Outreach; and the Planning Committee of the UTD-U.N. Conference on Women, sponsored by the School of Social Sciences and the Dallas Chapter of the United Nations. Dr. Alexander served as Faculty Advisor in UTD’s Office of Undergraduate Education under the Dean of Undergraduate Education. He is long-time Faculty Advisor to UTD's Baha'i Club.
Dr. Alexander is a member of the Board of Directors of the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University (Yale ISM), which advises the Director of the Yale ISM. In his role Dr. Alexander advised the Director in developing a strategic plan for the Institute and creating an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, global ISM Fellows program in Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts and a related research center at the Yale ISM. He is a member of With One Voice, a Dallas-based coalition of public and government institutions – including Dallas County's Parkland Hospital – and non-profit organizations providing a variety of services to immigrants in North Texas, and a member of the Resource Council for the New Americans Project assisting immigrants residing in the region. He is past President of the Board of Directors of the Oak Cliff Center for Community Studies (OCCCS), a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization he helped to found to continue the activities of the FIPSE grant and expand them to include high school students enrolled in Dallas Independent School District high schools in Oak Cliff as well as their parents. Dr. Alexander is honorary Lifetime Member of the Board.
contact info
- E-mail: bcalex@utdallas.edu
- Home Page: http://www.utdallas.edu/~bcalex
- Office Phone: (972) 883-6898
- Fax: (972) 883-6297
- Office: GR 2.124 (Green Hall)
- Home Page: http://www.utdallas.edu/~bcalex
- Mail Address:
- Dr. Bobby C. Alexander
- University of Texas at Dallas
- 800 W. Campbell Rd
- Richardson, Texas 75080-3021
- Dr. Bobby C. Alexander
