Dr. Sharon Mar Adams’s research is grounded in continental philosophy and the study of religion, with particular emphasis on phenomenology, aesthetics, and the interrelation of art, meaning, and lived experience. Her work explores how religious, philosophical, and artistic traditions mediate experience, shape ethical imagination, and cultivate practices of attention, care, and responsibility. Drawing on phenomenological and comparative approaches, her research engages themes including art and embodiment, death and dying, gender and religious authority, contemplative practice, and the phenomenology of interpretation. She is particularly interested in dialogic and experiential modes of inquiry, including deep listening, slow looking, and reflective engagement as both scholarly methods and pedagogical practices. More recently, Dr. Adams’s work has expanded to examine the role of mediation in creating meaning, and interpretive implications of artificial intelligence in the humanities. This line of inquiry connects her long-standing interests in revelation, translation, and interpretive authority with emerging questions about AI-assisted learning, narrative formation, and knowledge production. Her research is closely integrated with her teaching and program leadership. This includes the design and direction of immersive, site-based learning experiences such as the Phenomenology of Art, Nature, and Religion in Italy Global Seminar, as well as course-linked co-curricular pedagogy that bridges classroom learning with museums, film, guest artists, and community engagement. Across these contexts, her work seeks to foster inclusive, reflective, and transformative learning environments that connect philosophy, religion, art, and contemporary ethical life.
keywords
Women and Religion, Gender, Literature and the Arts, Mormonism and New Religious Movements, Global Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophical Pedagogy
