McDaniel College announces new assistant professors

McDaniel College announces that Brad Stoddard, assistant professor of religious studies, and Paul Zajac, assistant professor of English, have recently joined the faculty at the college.

• Brad Stoddard of Towson, Md., is an assistant professor of religious studies at McDaniel. His teaching and research interests include religion and law, American religious history, new and marginal religious movements, world religions and social/cultural theory. Among the courses he has taught are “Religion and American Prisons” and “Religions and Law in America.” Currently, he is teaching “Introduction to Religious Studies,” “African-American Religious History” and “Religions in North America” at McDaniel.

He earned his Ph.D. from Florida State University where he completed his dissertation titled “The New Prison Reformers: Florida’s Faith-Based Prisons and the Politics of Religious Pluralism.” Stoddard received a bachelor’s degree with highest honors from the University of California at Berkeley and earned a master’s degree from Yale Divinity School.

• Paul Zajac, assistant professor of English, currently resides in Westminster, Md. He specializes in 16th- and 17th-century British literature with emphases in Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser and Milton; literature and religion; and emotion and the passions. He is teaching “Introduction to College Writing” and the First Year Seminar course “Shakespeare at the Movies” at McDaniel.

Zajac earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in English literature from the Pennsylvania State University, where he completed a dissertation titled “Reforming Contentment: Self, World, and Pastoral in English Renaissance Literature.” He graduated summa cum laude from Loyola University Maryland in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in English and Drama. He has an essay forthcoming in Studies in Philology about the “politics of contentment” in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”

For more information about McDaniel College, visit www.mcdaniel.edu.