My research considers how time is fundamental to the narratives that underlie our understanding of identity. More specifically, I look at the binary constructions of past and present, primitive and advanced, cutting-edge and backward, and how these contribute to conditions of epistemic foreclosure.
Current Projects
Upcoming Conferences:
“Saved by God: Christian Nationalism and Theology’s Limits to Justice and Peace,” College Theology Society Annual Convention (May 2026).
“Queer Contaminations: On Touching (and Tainting) the Past,” Leeds International Medieval Congress (July 2026).
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 framework of my dissertation into a short film.
Long-Term Interests:
Ruins: In my dissertation, I began to develop a framework for theology that considers ruins of dominant theological, epistemological, and socio-political systems. This is an interest that continues to lead in new directions, with epistemic and pedagogical implications. ‘Ruins,’ losses, of these systems exist everywhere, and many liberationist and post-colonial projects can be understood as digging back into the past that has been left behind. Our impulse with ruins, however, is to return them to an original state or to gather them up and place them (back) in service of dominant systems. We must look at the ecology of the ruin, the life that ruins now have elsewhere and outside the demands of our own desires.
Rurality in the Queer Imagination: This project examines how the ‘rural’ functions symbolically in queer popular and theoretical discourse as a temporally backward region. I suspect that this symbolism participates in generating rural space as one of disvalue, to be exploited by agribusiness, tech, and the tourist industry for the sake of the ‘urban.’ As a work of ethics and theology, I ask about the conditions under which it becomes acceptable to fail giving attention to the life-world of another in favor of one’s own, and how this failure enters into even scholarly discourse at the intersection of urban and rural.
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 Loyola University Chicago eCommons.
For other publications and conference activity, please see my CV.
Zaccary A. Haney, PhD 