About Neall W. Pogue

Approach to Research (including controversial communities and people)

Recently a graduate student interviewed me about The Nature of the Religious Right, which had been assigned as course reading. Her final questions reflected a fellow student’s comment as to why anyone should care about or even talk to “these” anti-environmentalist religious right supporters. I replied that the comment was valid and quite understandable. The white conservative evangelicals, who make up the religious right movement, are extremely offensive to a great number of people, but they nevertheless are an important political and voting demographic in America. We can indeed ignore them, but that choice fails to cancel out their social, cultural and political impact, including when it comes to our democracy’s environmental decisions.

It was never my intention to encourage readers to agree with white conservative evangelicals, but instead provide a deeper understanding of their culture and past, which defines how they view the world today. This approach offers an opportunity for building bridges of communication to attain mutually beneficial solutions to important environmental issues such as anthropogenic climate change. This foundational objective of finding a deeper understanding, or in other words, a community’s “cultural pulse,” remains the primary goal of my research as I move forward with different subject matter.

If the individual cannot exist without memory, neither can society.
-Historian John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (2015)

If we use research to humble the attitudes we might have towards another group…we will be more likely to approach that group and ask the question, ‘how can I collaborate in a way that benefits others?’
-Sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund (2018)

If you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see history is not simply the study of the past, it is an explanation of the present.
-Paul Hunham, The Holdovers (2023)

Education

Ph.D., Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 2016
M.A., North Dakota State University, Fargo, ND 2010
Education Certification, The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 2005
Massachusetts Educator License, 2005
Bachelor of Arts (with Honors), St. Andrews University, St. Andrews, Scotland, UK. 2003
High school, Smith Academy, Hatfield, MA. 1998


My experiences living and working in Massachusetts, Scotland, Florida, North Dakota, Texas and Alaska have all contributed to my understandings and appreciation of different viewpoints, cultures, and natural environments.

Other Interests