Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Illinois religion professor awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois professor of religion Jonathan Ebel has been awarded a 2017 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.

Ebel is one of 173 scholars, artists and scientists named as 2017 Guggenheim Fellows. They were chosen from almost 3,000 applicants on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, according to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in a press release.

Ebel will use his fellowship tenure to complete work on a religious history of the Great Depression and the New Deal in agricultural California. He is studying the encounters between Dust Bowl refugees and New Deal officials.

“Destitute ‘Okie’ migrants who found refuge in federally run migratory farm labor camps also found camp managers, nurses and home economists who were eager to modernize the migrants’ lifestyles, including their religious attitudes and behaviors,” Ebel said. “My book tells the story of this decade-long interaction and of the religious conflicts that unfolded between secular reformers and the men and women displaced by the economic and natural catastrophes of the Great Depression.”

Ebel specializes in the religious history of the United States. He has written on the role religion plays in shaping American soldiers’ war experiences and the nation’s war memories. Ebel is the author of “G.I. Messiahs: Soldiering, War, and American Civil Religion” (Yale University Press, 2015) and “Faith in the Fight: Religion and the American Solider in the Great War” (Princeton University Press, 2010). He also co-edited “From Jeremiad to Jihad: Religion, Violence, and America” (University of California Press, 2012) with professor John Carlson of Arizona State University.

In addition to his Guggenheim project, Ebel is also in the early stages of researching and writing a religious history of American warfare, told in five weapons.

Ebel received a B.A. from Harvard in 1993 and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2004. He served as a naval intelligence officer from 1993-97 and continued in that capacity in the Navy Reserve until 2005.

Editor’s note: To reach Jonathan Ebel, email jebel@illinois.edu.

Read Next

Health and medicine Life sciences Veterinary medicine Two men in a lab. The seated man holds a hologram projection of a brain.

Mutation increases enzyme in mouse brains linked to schizophrenia behaviors

Researchers found a key role for an enzyme regulating glycine in the brain while investigating a rare genetic mutation found in two patients with schizophrenia.

Honors A photo collage featuring all three Sloan Fellowship awardees.

Three Illinois professors named Sloan Research Fellows

Three Illinois scientists are among 126 recipients of the 2025 Sloan Research Fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. According to the foundation, the awardees represent “the very best of early-career science, embodying the creativity, ambition, and rigor that drive discovery forward.” This year’s Illinois recipients are chemistry professors Angad Mehta and Lisa Olshansky, and materials science and engineering professor Yingjie Zhang.

Life sciences Graphic with the title "42nd Insect Fear Film Festival" in a scary font and with a picture of a tarantula.

Insect Fear Film Festival to feature ‘hairy, scary’ tarantulas

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The 2025 Insect Fear Film Festival at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will feature “Tarantulas: Hairy, Scary Spiders” as its theme and a Hollywood bug wrangler who works with the 8-legged creatures as a special guest. The festival, which is hosted by the Entomology Graduate Student Association and is in its 42nd […]

Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

507 E. Green St
MC-426
Champaign, IL 61820

Email: stratcom@illinois.edu

Phone (217) 333-5010