Professor of Religious Studies B.A., Valparaiso University; M.Div., Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago; M.A., Ph.D., University of Chicago

Gregory D. Alles, Professor of Religious Studies, came to McDaniel College (formerly Western Maryland College) in 1987, after teaching at Southwest Missouri State University (now Missouri State University) and Valparaiso University.  His interests center on the religions of south Asia as well as methods and theories in the study of religions and disciplinary history.  He has also taught at the University of Munich.

Widely published in English and German, he has contributed chapters to several books, and his articles have appeared in Culture and Religion, Historical Reflections/Reflexions historiques, History of Religions, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal of the Oriental Institute–Baroda, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Numen, Religion, and Temenos.  Author of The Iliad, the Ramayana, and the Work of Religion:  Failed Persuasion and Religious Mystification (1994), he has recently edited Religious Studies: A Global View (2008) and co-edited, with Robert Ellwood, The Encyclopedia of World Religions (2nd ed, 2006).

Professor Alles is a past president of the North American Association for the Study of Religion, a recipient of an NEH research fellowship, and of a Fulbright research fellowship to India.  In 2006 he was awarded the medal Centenar Mircea Eliade by the president of Romania.  A long-standing member of the editorial boards of the journals Religion and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, he also sits on the organizing committee for the upcoming Congress of the International Association for the History of Religion, to be held in Toronto in 2010.  He is finishing a book on the early 20th century philosopher of religion, Rudolf Otto.  Other current interests include cognitive scientific and economic approaches to the study of religions and oral literature and religion among the Rathwas, an adivasi (“tribal”) people in western India.