Richard J. Callahan, Jr., is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri in Columbia. He is the author of Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Subject to Dust (Indiana, 2009) and the editor of New Territories, New Perspectives: The Religious Impact of the Louisiana Purchase (Missouri, 2008). Drawing on his background in folkloristics, Callahan’s research focuses on intersections of work, materiality, space, and exchange in American religion. His current project, tentatively titled "Cutting In and Trying Out: A Religious History of the U.S. Whaling Industry," takes these interests into oceanic spaces of the global networks of natural resource extraction and cultural interaction.