Faculty Spotlight: Q&A with Matthew Vega, PhD

The USD College of Arts and Sciences (the college) hired 14 new faculty members in three distinctive themes – Borders and Social Justice, Technology and the Human Experience and Climate Change and Environmental Justice – this past fall.

As part of the university's commitment to academic excellence, the college endeavored to assemble a cohort of teacher-scholars who offer a strong contribution to the diversity and excellence of USD through teaching, scholarship, service and collaboration.

This spring semester, the college is featuring each new faculty member with a Q&A series every week. Each spotlight highlights their professional journeys, academic expertise, research and their goals for fostering academic and personal growth within the USD community. 

Learn more about Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies Matthew Vega, PhD, his background and his passion for research and teaching in the Q&A below.

Cluster-Theme: Borders and Social Justice

Q: Please share your name, title, department and the subjects or courses you will be teaching at USD.

A: My name is Matthew Vega, and I’m an assistant professor of theology and religious studies. I teach courses related to race, class and religion in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies as well as the Africana Studies program. I have studied religion since I was an undergraduate student. 

Q: What key experiences have shaped your career and where you are today?

A: My experiences as a first-generation college student, a Black Mexican-American who grew up on public assistance, a son of a Black mother and a Mexican-American police officer, and a sibling of a formerly incarcerated person have informed my understanding of justice and how the world should be. 

One of the things that drew me into the study of religion, and continues to draw me into the study of religion, is an innate sense that normative claims could be liberating, even if they’ve been harmful across time, space and circumstance. Religions often make normative claims (about how the world should be). For the past several decades, intellectual currents (mainly from within Europe and the United States) have attacked any idea that is haughty enough to claim that the world should look a particular way, governed a particular way, and dreamt of a particular way. Non-normative currents argue that the plurality of norms itself betrays a world that is inherently uncontainable by the restrictions of oughts and dogmas. 

What happens when we accept a world that is no longer governed by basic moral norms like “love your neighbor as yourself,” “liberation [for the planet, nonhuman species, societies],” or “care for the poor and oppressed” and is instead governed by a natural drive for power and domination? What happens when moral norms are axiomatically defined as historically contingent and absolutely nonbinding? What happens when morals are evanescent, not transcendent, so what I do to you now doesn’t change my personhood in any meaningful way or offends justice because justice doesn’t exist? Religions routinely call our attention to both the world as it is and how it should be. Those visions of otherwise captured me as a young person and still do today.

Q: What sparked your interest in the Borders and Social Justice cluster theme, and what drew you to this particular focus? How are you contributing to that focus in your work here?

A: I am interested in Borders and Social Justice because I am a Blaxican man. The term Blaxican is a portmanteau that dismantles the gerrymandered borders of the social categories “Black” and “Mexican,” arguing that one can be both. As a theologian who is deeply engaged in the richness and texture of human life, my work also collapses the boundaries between the “social sciences” and “theology,” between “religion” and “theology,” and between the “scholarly” and the “confessional.” As a theologian who has been involved in many social justice spaces, I have been sustained by visions of love and social justice; of worlds not yet realized, but still worth struggling for.

Q: What aspects of joining the University of San Diego community are you most excited about?

A: I am most excited about working with the people in my department. Anyone who takes a quick glance through the theology and religious studies faculty website will be quickly disabused of the idea that theology and religious studies is an inherently conservative discipline. My colleagues are animated by worthwhile and meaningful aims: racial justice, gender and sexuality justice, Indigenous rights, food justice, borders and migration, displacement, combating religious prejudice, and a general sense that the work that we do should positively form the lives our students, not just help them land a job. They are doing the difficult work of translating sacred texts for modern contexts, and teaching students about the virtues that slow-reading both forms and requires. 

Q: How do you envision your course curriculum contributing to the academic and personal growth of USD students?

A: All of my classes explore the moral stakes of religious terms and questions. For example, when my students are asked to consider religion as a network of grammar, rituals, moral/political practices, habits and affections, I want them to think of how their own lives are being formed in these ways. What terms do they use to consider the world as it should be? Why? What kind of a person are they becoming, and how are they habituating the virtues necessary to become the person they want to be? Religions can teach us about being a good neighbor, becoming attentive to the “invisible,” and developing empathy for others. I want my students to walk away from my classes with a deeper appreciation for the richness, challenges, and complexities of moral and religious life. 

Q: What current research projects are you working on or interested in, and how do they align with your cluster theme?

A: I am currently writing two chapters for two separate volumes: one is on Emmett Till, and the other is on Martin Luther King, Jr. My chapter on Emmett Till explores the lessons that Black Death spectacles teach broader audiences. For example, what lessons are we supposed to take away from watching people die on our cell phones? What lessons are we being taught, and what lessons should we teach? My chapter on Martin Luther King, Jr. explores how his competing legacies also teach different lessons about his life and ministry.  

Q: What’s an interesting or unique fact about yourself that others might not know?

A: I love Bananagrams, basketball, hip-hop and reality television. I am also trying to learn how to skateboard and play pickleball. I briefly got into Ninja Warrior/parkour gyms, and would love to keep learning if someone knows where I can practice!