George González is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology (Religion and Culture) at Baruch College-CUNY. Within religious studies, he specializes in religion and economy, secularism 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 a single-authored monograph entitled Shape-Shifting Capital—Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the Ethnographic Project. This first book 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 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’ second major research project focuses on the American ritualization of consumer capitalism. Within the scope of this project, Professor González conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the famed 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. He is busy at work on a new manuscript tentatively titled The Religion of Everyday Life (Under contract with NYU Press) based on this research.
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 Baruch College that is firmly grounded and anchored in 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 