Amy Allocco, an assistant professor of religious studies, has been appointed to serve on the International Connections Committee of the American Academy of Religion. Her appointment to this six-member committee, made by AAR President Ann Taves of the University of California Santa Barbara, will be for a four-year term.
According to the AAR, “The International Connections Committee fosters attention to the worldwide scope of scholarship in religion and the international composition of the Academy’s membership.” Allocco was involved with early efforts to internationalize the AAR and its scholarly journal, The Journal of the American Academy of Religion, in her capacity as a research assistant to two Ford Foundation grants secured by JAAR editors in 2002 and 2004.
She also served as an “ambassador’ for a scholar from India whom the AAR’s International Connections Committee sponsored to attend its annual meeting in 2009, when the meeting’s geographic focus was South Asia.
At the recent annual meeting of the AAR in Atlanta (Oct. 29 – Nov. 1, 2010) Allocco was elected to the Steering Committee of the Comparative Studies in Hinduisms and Judaisms Group and to the Board of Directors for the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies.
Founded in 1909, the AAR is a learned and professional association of 11,000 members “dedicated to furthering knowledge of religion and religious institutions in all their forms and manifestations.”