Clayton State University

Faculty Member, Visual & Performing Arts

Assistant Professor

Arts and Letters

Thesis Title: "Jesus People USA, the Christian Woodstock, and Conflicting Worlds: Political, Theological, and Musical Evolution, 1972-2010"

About

Shawn David Young is an assistant professor at Clayton State University.  His research deals with popular music studies, contemporary American religious history and philosophy, the music industry, communal studies, the Jesus People Movement, critical cultural theory, and countercultural studies. Young is interested in how discourse affects musical and ideological evolution within spaces influenced by pluralism.  He has been working with Dr. David W. Stowe in researching the contemporary Christian music subculture and various connections to the Religious Right and the Evangelical Left.  Young's dissertation is titled "Jesus People USA, the Christian Woodstock, and Conflicting Worlds: Political, Theological, and Musical Evolution, 1972-2010."  Other interests include apocalypticism and connections to religious belief and public policy.  Selected publications include an article in the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Volume 22(2): Summer 2010; entries in an anthology titled September 11 in Popular Culture, Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2010; three forthcoming chapters in an anthology titled Cult Pop Culture: How the Fringe Became Mainstream, with Praeger; and one forthcoming chapter in Culture/Counter-culture: Festivals and Faires in America with Edwin Mellen Press.  Young has also contributed entries on dystopian communities and rock history in ABC-CLIO's World History Encyclopedia.  Young also contributes blogs to Patheos.com and is a news editor for Religion Compass Exchanges, an online site associated with Religion Compass, a journal affiliated with Wiley-Blackwell.  He is the area chair for subculture with the Midwest Popular Culture Association.

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