Lincoln, Bruce 1948-

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LINCOLN, Bruce 1948-

PERSONAL: Born March 5, 1948, in Philadelphia, PA; son of William D. (a real estate agent) and Geraldine (a clinical psychologist; maiden name, Kovsky) Lincoln; married Louise Gibson Hassett (a curator and art historian), April 17, 1971; children: Rebecca, Martha (twins). Education: Haverford College, B.A. (with high honors), 1970; University of Chicago, Ph.D. (with distinction), 1976. Politics: "Unaffiliated Marxist, leaning to anarcho-syndicalism."

ADDRESSES: Home—3232 Bryant Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55408. Office—Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, 350 Folwell Hall, University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN 55455; Department of History of Religion, University of Chicago, 1025 East 58th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

CAREER: History of Religions, Chicago, IL, editorial assistant, 1973-75; University of Minnesota—Twin Cities, Minneapolis, assistant professor, 1976-79, associate professor, 1979-1984, professor of humanities, religious studies, and South Asian studies, and chair of religious studies program, 1979-86, professor of comparative studies in discourse and society, beginning 1986, scholar of the college, 1990-93; University of Chicago, Chicago, professor of history of religions and anthropology, beginning 1993. Visiting professor, Universita degli Studi di Siena, Italy, 1984-85, University of Uppsala, Sweden, 1985, Novosibirsk State Pedagogical Institute, Russia, 1991.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Council of Learned Societies, grant, 1979, citation for best new book in the history of religion, 1981, for Priests, Warriors,and Cattle: A Study in the Ecology of Religions; grants from Rockefeller Foundation, 1981, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1982-83, and National Endowment for the Humanities, 1986; citation for outstanding academic book, Choice, 1989, for Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification.

WRITINGS:

Priests, Warriors, and Cattle: A Study in the Ecology of Religions, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1981.

Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women's Initiation, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1981, revised edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor) Religion, Rebellion, Revolution: An Interdisciplinary and Crosscultural Collection of Essays, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1985.

Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1986.

Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1991.

Authority: Construction and Corrosion, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1994.

Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1999.

Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Soteriology of the Oriental Cults in the Roman Empire, edited by Ugo Biancho, E. J. Brill (Long Island City, NY), 1982; Critical Essays on Mircea Eliade, edited by Hans-Peter Duerr, Syndikat, 1983; Proto-Indo-European: The Archeology of a Linguistic Problem; Festschrift for Marija Gimbutas, edited by Susan Skomal and Edgar Polome, Institute for the Study of Man; and Festschrift for Edgar Polome, edited by M. A. Jazayery, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX); also contributor to encyclopedias. Contributor to scholarly journals. Coeditor of special issues of History of Religions, May, 1977, and Cultural Critique, spring, 1989.

Some of Lincoln's books have been translated into Italian and Spanish.

SIDELIGHTS: Bruce Lincoln once told CA: "I tend to view religion as the desperate attempt to invest an otherwise meaningless existence with some sense of purpose and worth. It thus has its origins in the human imagination, not in some divine sphere, and proper study of religion begins with the external factors which condition the exercise of the imagination within any given culture, including such factors as geography, climate, and patterns of social, political, and economic organization. In some measure, religion is a valorization and legitimation of those givens, being an attempt to endow the world in which one must live with a sense of transcendent meaning. On the other hand, religion can become a reaction against those same givens and an attempt to flee them for another level of existence beyond this life and world.

"I find myself simultaneously fascinated and utterly repelled by religious phenomena—myths, rituals, cosmologies, soteriologies, and the like. I suppose this is part of my family legacy, my great-grandfather having been a Russian anarchist and atheist, my great-grandmother (his wife) an orthodox Jew."

Lincoln is competent in Sanskrit, Avestan, Greek, Latin, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Old Persian, Pahlavi, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and has some knowledge of Hittite, Russian, Old Irish, Welsh, and Portuguese.