Darryl Caterine, Ph.D

Darryl V. Caterine is a historian of religions whose research focuses on the intersections of religion, culture, and politics in the United States and parts of Latin America. His areas of academic interest include Latino/a religions, metaphysical/occult religions in America, and religion and popular culture. His first book, Conservative Catholicism and the Carmelites: Identity, Ethnicity and Tradition in the Modern Church (2001), is an ethnographic study of a conservative Catholicism in Latino/a communities, which analyzes the uses of myth and ritual to advance various religio- and ethnopolitical agendas in the U.S. borderlands. His second ethnographic book, Haunted Ground: Journeys through a Paranormal America (2011), explores the meaning of our nation’s fascination with paranormal phenomena through a series of thick descriptions and analyses of a Spiritualist camp in upstate New York, the Roswell UFO Festival in New Mexico, and an annual dowsing convention in Vermont. Caterine has published several articles on religion and popular culture in the United States, and is currently co-editing a collection of scholarly essays entitled, The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape (Routledge Press, 2019). His course offerings include classes in American religion and society, American Catholic history, varieties of Latino/a religions, and metaphysical/occult traditions in U.S. history.