Since 2011 Professor Chad Seales has taught at The University of Texas at Austin where he is an associate professor of Religious Studies and Brian F. Bolton Distinguished Professor in Secular Studies. He taught at New College of Florida in Sarasota and George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, before arriving at UT Austin.
His research addresses the cultural relationship between religion and secularism in American life. He is editor of the Routledge Handbook of Religion and American Culture. In his 2019 book Religion Around Bono: Evangelical Enchantment and Neoliberal Capitalism, he explores Bono’s career and examines the religious and spiritual culture around him, including a wider critique of white American evangelicalism.
Seales is also the author of The Secular Spectacle: Performing Religion in a Southern Town and has published articles and book chapters on religious comparison, religion and food, industrial religion, corporate chaplaincy, religion and film, and secularism and secularization in the United States.
In 2023 he was a guest lecturer at the Obama Institute, presenting “Sweet Jesus: How Evangelicalism Became the Religion of Industrial Agriculture, and How It Might Help End It.”
2023 Religious Studies profile: https://sites.utexas.edu/religiology/2023/10/19/finding-what-wakes-you-up-a-feature-on-dr-chad-seales-and-his-career-as-a-religious-studies-scholar-the-importance-of-theory-and-his-advice-for-graduate-students/