Current Projects
Short-Term Projects:
Theology as World-Building: I am working on an interdisciplinary project that uses theories of subcreation to articulate theology as a discourse of performative utterances that engage in the practice of building ‘imaginary’ worlds.
Seven Minutes in Sodom: A collaboration with a cinematographer to transform the erotic narrative framing of my dissertation into a short film.
Long-Term Project:
My current research considers the neo-colonialism of the rural United States in agricultural and technological extractive capitalism. I am examining queer and progressive rhetoric that renders rural spaces as dangerous for certain kinds of persons and I question how this rhetoric contributes the mythology of the rural as waste, undeveloped, and emptied of human value. Drawing especially on archival research, this project contributes to the growing corpus of anti-urbanism and critiques of metronormativity in queer theory. It challenges what I perceive to be a norm among queer scholars who attempt to find new queers in new, unexpected places, and instead confronts us with how queerness itself can participate in and perpetuate colonial dominance.
Recent & Forthcoming Publications
“Lost Hope, Failed Desire: Theology as a Discourse on Ruin,” College Theology Society Annual Volume: The Locus of the Theological Vocation. Orbis Books, 2026. Forthcoming.
“Into Queer Silence: Resisting the Theological Voice,” DARE Primer in Global Queer Theologies. Edited by Hugo Córdova Quero, Lisa Isherwood, Graham Mcgeoch and Edwin Thankachan. SCM Press, 2025. Pages 285-298.
Dissertation
Title: Perverse Convergences: Aelred of Rievaulx and the Queerness of Waiting
Advisor: Miguel H. Díaz, PhD
Committee: Colby Dickinson, PhD and Emily Cain, PhD
Defended with Distinction: April 16, 2025
An eroticized narrative between the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot, Aelred of Rievaulx, and me, this dissertation pushed against normative genres in academic writing. I combine erotic fiction with critical theory, historical inquiry, and liberation theology to articulate a method in theology that resists easy, ‘ideological,’ conclusions about the divine. The dissertation centers the question of Aelred’s sexuality, which became an important and heated debate in Cistercian studies through the 1980s and 1990s. The question that I asked was not whether he was or was not gay, but why it is that scholars and readers of Aelred either want or do not want him to have been. Ultimately, I argue that theology forms itself as a discourse of authoritative social magic that attempts to force God to arrive in ways that align with the theologian’s own (often liberating) desires. In doing so, the theologian risks covering up or ignoring when God indeed does not arrive in a savory or agreeable manner, thus limiting the extent to which theologies can be truly liberating.
Available at ProQuest. Institutional access may be required.
For other publications and conference activity, please see my CV.
Zaccary A. Haney, PhD 