Briane Turley

Teaching Fields

• The Appalachian Hungarian Heritage
• US Carceral History
• Modern European and American Religious History
• Religion and Culture in the US South
• History of Christianity and Christian thought

Degrees

• Ph.D., University of Virginia, 1994
• M.A., University of Virginia, 1984 
• M.Div., Nazarene Theological Seminary, 1984
•  B.A., West Virginia University, 1981

Research Interests

During his Fellowship year at Corvinus University’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Budapest, Dr. Turley organized the Appalachian Hungarian Heritage Project, which involves a multidisciplinary team of scholars from the US and Hungary. After serving as the Library Director for a Department of Corrections facility, he also gained keen interest in the history of incarceration in the United States.

A trained religious historian, Turley looks at the role of religions in any topic he examines with the assumption that that social history and history of ideas are not mutually exclusive methods. He is especially interested in gathering and interpreting narratives from the living and from the literary remains of the dead.

Dr. Turley is currently pursuing research on the yet unexplored role of Hungarian laborers and their families in community building (e.g., churches and social organizations) across Appalachia. In addition, he is completing a book on the topic of American carceral history titled Doing Time in a Land of Liberty.

Publications

Books

(co-authored with John Super), Religion in World History: The Persistence of Imperial Communion (London: Routledge, 2006).

A Wheel Within a Wheel: Southern Methodism and the Georgia Holiness Association (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999).

Selected Articles

“The Coaldust Absorbs our Tears: The Life and Labor of Appalachian Hungarian Coal Miners , 1880-1934,” West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies, forthcoming.

"Ministers and Masters: Methodism, Manhood, and Honor in the Old South," Louisiana History Journal, Summer 2014.

“The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies,” Journal of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, November 2010.

“Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City,” Journal of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, March 2007.

(with Rodger Payne), “Navigating a New Landscape: Religious and Technological Pluralism in Diana Eck's On Common Ground,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 1999.

“John Wesley and War,” Methodist History, January 1991, pp. 96-111.

"A Wheel Within a Wheel: Southern Methodism and the Georgia Holiness Association,"

Georgia Historical Quarterly, Summer 1991, pp. 295-322.

Awards

Turley has received four Fulbright Awards including a Lectureship at the University of Szeged in Hungary, the Alumni Initiative Fulbright, and two lectureships granted under the Fulbright Specialist program. In September 2011, the University of Szeged faculty awarded him their highest honor, the Pro Facultate Philosophiae Medal for his pioneering work in the digital humanities and online publishing. He remains only the second scholar in the school’s history to receive the award. In 2019, he received a residential research grant from the Corvinus Institute for Advanced Studies in Budapest Hungary.