John Lardas was born in Akron, Ohio. He received his BA in Religion from Princeton University (1993), his MA in Comparative Religion from Miami University (Ohio), and his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2003). John is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College where he teaches courses in religious history, literature, and critical theory.

John’s courses and research engage one of the most pressing issues facing scholarly, legal, and public debates—the relationship between religious discourses and their secular counterparts. Religion, he argues, is a matter of public import. Religious beliefs and practices are intimately entangled with power—the power to define the human in relation to the supernatural and the subhuman, the power to create and maintain worldviews and perceptual regimes, the power to authorize and/or destabilize political rationalities and economic modalities, and the power to naturalize sexual, ethnic, and gender hierarchies. His work challenges both those scholars who fail to account for the power of cultural forms upon religious beliefs and practices as well as those who dismiss religion as epiphenomenal rather view it as a persistent presence in the modern age. By focusing on the interplay between “religious” and “secular” phenomena John’s work offers new perspectives on a range of subjects including the problems of belief in an emergent network society, the history of secularism in America, the transatlantic origins of anthropology, the disciplinary techniques of evangelical preaching, the imperialist dimensions of occult religions, as well as works of imaginative literature.

John’s courses included a two-semester sequence on the cultural history of American religion, Theoretical Perspectives in the Study of Religion, as well as seminars on religion and politics, visual culture, Evangelicalism, and artists such as Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Laurie Anderson.

John is the author of a book on the poetics of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs (University of Illinois Press, 2001). He has also written or co-written pieces on the religious criticism of Walter Benjamin, live nativity scenes in the midwest, the ethical agenda of advertising schools, the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, and the works of Charles Olson and Don DeLillo. John is currently revising his dissertation, “Specters of Moby-Dick: A Particular History of Cultural Metaphysics in America,” into two separate studies. The first, Haunted Modernity: Specters and Leviathans in Antebellum America, examines the religious history generated by technological, economic, and information networks in antebellum America. The second, Melvillean Frequencies, explores how Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) became a reservoir from which an array of twentieth-century artists and intellectuals drew religious questions concerning such developments as cinema, public opinion research, Cold War imperialism, cybernetics, the “military-industrial complex,” network television, the internet, and terrorism.

John's wife, Libby Kleine, is an artist and co-founder of half-full, a non-profit group that provides graphic design for environmental and social organizations. .