Leonard Norman Primiano, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Religious Studies
Co-Director, Honors Program
Recipient, Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching
Leonard Norman Primiano, Ph.D. came to Cabrini’s Religious Studies department in 1993 with a foundation in religious studies and folklore and folklife studies, and a desire to teach courses on the history of Christianity, vernacular religion, religious folklife, contemporary moral problems, and contemporary American religion.
Throughout his years at the College, he has dedicated himself to teaching students about the relationship of these exciting fields.
Primiano serves as co-producer of The Father Divine Project, a multimedia documentary and video podcast about Father Divine, Mother Divine, and the Peace Mission Movement, which can be seen and heard at www.fatherdivineproject.org. In 2010, he was selected to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities-supported Summer Fellowship program Broadening the Digital Humanities, held at the Vectors-IML/UC-HRI Summer Institute at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. He is also writing and producing the documentary film I Know You Are God: The Marriage of Father and Mother Divine.
Primiano is the co-chair of Cabrini College Society for Religion and Science, a three-year program sponsored by the Metanexus Institute on Religion and Science Local Societies Initiative. The program, which runs through 2011, has brought speakers to campus, organized book discussions, and sponsored feature film presentations and after-film discussions.
Since its inception in 2002, he has served as the developer and curator of Cabrini's Religious Folk, Popular, Liturgical Arts Collection. In 2010, he curated, with Ben Danner ’13, The Religious Mind: The Art of Science, Religion, and Healing at Cabrini’s Grace and Joseph Gorevin Fine Arts Gallery. In 2006, he coordinated the acquisition of The Don Yoder Collection of Religious Folk Art.
Primiano was elected to the Executive Board of the American Folklore Society for a three-year term starting in January 2011. He is the co-chair of the Folk Belief and Religious Folklife section of the American Folklore Society. He also is co-chair of the Space, Place, and Religious Meaning Consultation of the American Academy of Religion.
In June 2010, he traveled to Warsaw, Poland, to deliver a paper at the Sixth Conference of the SIEF Working Group on Ethnology of Religion which had as its theme: “Experiencing Religion: New Approaches towards Personal Religiosity.”
In 2011, he will offer papers at the annual meetings of the American Folklore Society in Bloomington, Ind.; the American Academy of Religion in San Francisco, Calif.; and in 2012 he will lecture at The Ohio State University’s Center For Folklore Studies.
Academic honors include selection in 2010 for the American Folklore Society/Mellon Foundation sponsored program and book series, “Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World,” supporting the development and publication of his upcoming monograph, God’s Paintings in Wool: The Vernacular Religious Art of Sister Ann Ameen by the University of Illinois Press. Additional honors are the 2007 American Academy of Religion Collaborative Research Grant and the 1998 American Academy of Religion Individual Research Grant. From 2000 to 2001, he was a member of the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of the Church-Related College.
In 1999, he received the Lindback Distinguished Teaching Award from Cabrini. In 1998-99, he served as specialist in folk and popular religion for the national exhibit, "Angels from the Vatican: The Invisible Made Visible." Primiano was named a Fellow in the Young Scholars in American Religion program at the Center For the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University-Purdue University in 1997-98.
His research areas include American religion; vernacular, folk and popular religion; American folklore and folklife studies; religious material culture (including Roman Catholic "holy cards"); and religion and the media, including Catholicism and television.
Recent and upcoming publications include:
- “I Wanna Do Bad Things With You: Fantasia on Themes of American Religion from the Title Sequence of HBO’s True Blood” in God In The Details: American Religion In Popular Culture
- “The Consciousness of God’s Presence Will Keep You Well, Healthy, Happy, and Singing: The Tradition of Innovation in the Music of Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement” in The New Black Gods: Arthur Huff Fauset and the Study of African American Religions
- “For What I Have Done and What I Have Failed to Do: Vernacular Catholicism and The West Wing” in Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion
- “Artifacts of Belief: Catholic Holy Cards in American Culture” in Ephemera Across the Atlantic: Popular Print Culture in Two Worlds.
In September 2011, Primiano opened “Graces Received: Painted and Metal Ex-Votos from Italy,” an exhibition of votive objects from his own collection, at the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City which can be seen through January 2012. A December 2011 publication on this exhibition contains his essay: “Catholiciana Unmoored: Ex-votos in Catholic Tradition and their Commercialization as Religious Commodities.”
Primiano earned a B.A. in religious studies, an M.A. in folklore and folklife, and a dual Ph.D. in religious studies and folklore and folklife, all from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a master of theological studies from Harvard University.
Contact information:
Dr. Leonard Primiano
Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies
Co-Director, Honors Program
Grace Hall, Room 250
610-902-8330
Fax: 610-902-8285
primiano@cabrini.edu