Norman Giradot
Norman Girardot is the University Distinguished Professor in the Religion Studies Department. Trained in the comparative history of religions under Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago, he taught at Notre Dame University and Oberlin College before coming to Lehigh. His special research areas include Chinese religious tradition, especially Daoism, popular religious movements, and the relation of religion and outsider or visionary art. Among his most recent publications are two forthcoming books — Daoism and Ecology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions) and The Victorian Translation of China. James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Los Angeles, Berkeley, and London: University of Californai Press). Working closely with the Lehigh University Art Galleries, he has co-curated a number of exhibitions of outsider/visionary folk art, the most recent of which was entitled “Four Outsider Artists: The End is a New Beginning.” While at Lehigh he has also developed a number of exceedingly strange, yet curiously refreshing, courses and quasi-shamanistic performance events — including such courses and events as Deep Play: Doing Myth and Ritual at Lehigh; The Daoist Phantasmagoria; Jesus, Buddha, Mao, and Elvis; Raw Vision: Shamans, Mystics, and Outsider Artists; the levitation of Rauch Business school, the Blessing of the Hounds, Dao Day, Zac Day, the First Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine Campus Revival; and the construction of the Lehigh Concrete Millennial Folk Arch. It has also been noted that he has a peculiar, and seemingly perverse if not obscene, fondness for gourds. For selected publications, courses taught and vitae, visit Lehigh’s Religion Department website at http://www.lehigh.edu/~inrel/ 
