Rate My Professor Joseph Witt

Joseph Witt serves as Associate Professor of Religion and Associate Head in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a position he has held since 2022. He earned his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Florida in 2011, with a dissertation on religion and resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. Prior to his appointment at UTK, Witt was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Mississippi State University. His academic career emphasizes community-engaged scholarship at the intersection of religion, nature, and culture.

Witt's research specializations include religious analyses of environmental issues, eco-resistance movements, and community encounters with ecological challenges, particularly in Appalachian contexts. He authored the book Religion and Resistance in Appalachia, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2016. Other key publications feature contributions to the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, such as articles exploring religion-nature-culture nexuses, and chapters like those in Dark Green Religion and Natural Space and Religion in North America. In January 2025, he assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief for the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture. Witt has secured grants including the University of Tennessee ORIED SARIF Scholarly Projects Fund for a Community-Engaged Research and Teaching Workshop (2023, $11,103.95) as principal investigator, and earlier funding for environmental humanities initiatives at Mississippi State University (2016, $2,500). His public engagement includes lectures on religious responses to environmental disasters, AI and the knowing soul, and planetary thinking in environmental movements. Witt contributes to professional service through roles in the American Academy of Religion's Publicly Engaged Scholarship seminar and the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture.