Help Humberto Complete His PhD Dissertation

My name is Humberto Perez and I am a PhD candidate in the American Religious History program at Florida State University.

In addition to being a PhD student, I am a High School English and World Religions teacher at Coral Reef Senior High where I also coach the JV Girls Soccer team and the Badminton team. I sponsor the Psi Alpha Psychology Honors Society and the Dungeons and Dragons clubs at the school. I am also an adjunct lecturer at Florida International University.

Somewhere in my free time, I am working on finishing my dissertation on the Christian influences on the development of Wiccan religious identity. The working title of the dissertation is Wiccan Great Awakening: The Maturation and Development of Wicca as a Uniquely American Religion.

The narrative arc of this project is to tell the story of how Wicca is imported into the United States, is incubated and developed in this culture where Christian beliefs and religiosity dominate, and eventually matures beyond a Christian understanding of what it means to be religious to cultivate its own religious identity. My project will also show how, as Wicca grows and matures as a religion, it pushes back against these inherited Christian perspectives and forms its own sense of religious identity that clashes against the dominant Protestant Christian ideology of Christianity in the United States, even as it carries forward elements of Protestant religious practice. In the same way that evangelical Christianity adapted to meet the needs of life in the New World, Wicca has evolved in form and practice from its origins in England to address the requirements of its American audience and become a genuinely American religion.

I have started Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube channels to document the dissertation writing process and research trip so folks can get a look at how the sausage is made so to speak. You can follow ElBrujo_Perez on those socials to join me on my journey.