Alexander Tristan Riley Bucknell University, USA, University of California San Diego, USA, Wesleyan University, USA

Alexander Riley has written a good deal on Durkheim and from a fundamentally Durkheimian perspective on various topics over the past 15 years. These writings include his doctoral thesis at the University of California, San Diego (“In Pursuit of the Sacred: The Durkheimian Sociologists of Religion and the Modern Intellectual”) and several of his books (Godless Intellectuals? The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented; Impure Play: Sacredness, Transgression, and the Tragic in Popular Culture; and the forthcoming Angel Patriots in the Sky: The Crash of United Flight 93 and the Myth of America). He is spending the academic year 2013 through 2014 in Paris on a Fulbright Research Grant, along with his wife, Esmeralda; their daughter, Valeria; and the family cat.