Rate My Professor Travis Warren Cooper

Travis Warren Cooper is a Lecturer at Butler University in the International Studies department. He holds a double PhD in Religious Studies and Anthropology from Indiana University. As an ethnographer of the American Midwest, Cooper investigates social architectures that structure everyday life-worlds, rituals, and traditions, ranging from media ideologies and print culture to urban design and the built environment. His research centers on evangelicalism and religion in the digital age, including boundary maintenance strategies, authority contests, authenticity negotiation, and post-evangelical subcultures in social media contexts.

Cooper's major publication is the monograph The Digital Evangelicals: Contesting Authority and Authenticity after the New Media Turn (Indiana University Press, 2022), adapted from his dissertation. Key peer-reviewed articles include "Emerging, Emergent, Emergence: Boundary Maintenance, Definition Construction, and Legitimation Strategies in the Establishment of a Post-Evangelical Subculture" (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 2017), "Taxonomy Construction and the Normative Turn in Religious Studies" (Religions, 2017), "Objectivity Discourse, the Protestant Secular, and the Decolonization of Religious Studies" (Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 2019), "The Uncanniness of Missionary Others: A Discursive Analysis of a Century of Anthropological Writings on Missionary Ethnographers" (Religion and Society, 2018), and "Worship Rituals, Discipline, and Pentecostal-Charismatic 'Techniques du Corps' in the American Midwest" (Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, 2017). He has contributed chapters to American Examples, Vol. 1: New Conversations about Religion (University of Alabama Press, 2021) and The Pentecostal World (2023), as well as articles in Film Criticism ("Kogonada’s Urban Neorealism," 2020) and Urbanities ("How to Edit a Building: Fieldnotes from the North American Brasilia," 2019). Previously, Cooper served as a Research Fellow, Lived Religion in the Digital Age, and adjunct faculty in Philosophy and Religion at the University of Indianapolis. His scholarship appears in leading journals and public platforms such as The Religious Studies Project.