George González is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Religion and Culture at The CUNY Graduate Center and at Baruch College, City University of New York. Within religious studies, he specializes in religion and economy, implicit religion, capitalism studies, theories and methods in the study of religion, and religion and society (Modern West). He is the author of several peer-reviewed and scholarly articles as well as two single-authored research monographs.
Professor’s González’ second major research project focused on the American ritualization of consumer capitalism. Within the scope of this project, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the famed New York City-based radical performance community and choir, the Stop Shopping Church (a.k.a. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping) between 2016 and 2021. He has also conducted historiographical research into American marketing history in tandem with the fieldwork. A new manuscript based on this research and entitled The Church of Stop Shopping and Religious Activism: Combatting Consumerism and Climate Change Through Performance is published with NYU Press (December 2024). His first book, Shape-Shifting Capital—Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project (Lexington Books, 2015), is a critical analysis of the ‘spiritual’ turn in organizational theory and workplace practice.
Most broadly, Professor González’ research interests lay in the sociocultural legislation of Western metaphysics and the concrete and specific form of power that has attached to neoliberalism, as a historically specific kind of cosmology. In this, he pays special attention to cybernetic theory as a cultural dominant. He remains especially interested in approaching the study and criticism of what he calls (highly affective, embodied, symbolically mediated, and aestheticized) “post-secular” capitalism through the framework of religious social change. Professor González’ has special interests in the work ethnography can do at the intersections of religion, science, and global capitalism and as a complement and corrective to critical theory.
Professor González is currently working on an existential archeology of post-secular capitalism that is grounded in the life and times of a Beat poet and psychedelic artist who became influential in developing psychologically effective multimedia technologies for corporate and non-profit clients in the 1970s and 1980s. He is also researching an article on Latino/a/x religious experience in a commodified age. Professor González is in the development stages of two new major book projects, one a comparative sociology of contemporary neoliberal institutions and the other an ethnography of the religious lives of precarious Latina/x service workers in New York City.
Professor González is on the Editorial Board for Critical Research on Religion. He is also a Research Associate at the Center for Critical Research on Religion and Research Associate at the Edward Bailey Centre for the Study of Implicit Religion (U.K.). Professor González served on the inaugural steering committee for the Religion and Economy Program Unit at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) from 2016-2021. Professor González has reviewed for various scholarly journals and academic publishers in the study of religion.
Trained as a philosophical anthropologist (or existential sociologist), Professor González is committed to empowering students to better comprehend how power is reproduced in their own richly textured lives and teeming lifeworlds. As the son of Latin-American immigrants (from Perú and Cuba), a first-generation college student, and a native New Yorker, Professor González enjoys pursuing a research and teaching agenda at CUNY that is often rooted and grounded in the textures, cadences, and concerns of New York City life.
Professor González received his B.A. from Yale College (Comparative Literature), an M.A.R. from Yale Divinity School (Ethics), and a Ph.D. from Harvard Divinity School (Religion and Society). Prior to moving to Baruch in the Fall of 2018, he taught at Monmouth University (West Long Branch, NJ).
Professor González is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Eugene Lang Junior Faculty Fellowship (AY 22-23) and PSC-CUNY research grants (AY 20-21, 21-22, 22-23, 23-24).
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George Gonzalez 