Bell is Bernard J. Hanley Professor and chair of the Religious Studies Department at Santa Clara University, where she has taught since 1985.

Born and raised in New York City, Bell attended Manhattanville College, where she double-majored in philosophy and religion, earning her B.A. in 1975. She went on to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. in History of Religions from the Divinity School in the University of Chicago in 1976 and 1983, respectively. Before joining the faculty at Santa Clara, Bell taught at Seishin Joshi Gakuin in Tokyo from 1982 to 1983, and the International University of Japan in Nigata in 1983.

Bell’s research interests include History of Religions methodology; ritual studies; Asian religions; and Chinese religions, including popular religion, religious tracts (shanshu), and printing and ritual.

Her published work looks at the role of text and rite in Chinese religion and, more broadly, the efficacy of ritual in religion in general. Her first book, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) won the American Academic of Religion’s best first book in the History of Religions award in 1994, and is considered a seminal text in the study of ritual.

A celebrated teacher, Bell has offered a variety of courses in her home institution. These have addressed: ways of understanding religion; Asian traditions; Buddhism; Chinese Religions; Japanese religions; magic, science, and religion; comparing fundamentalisms; gender and religion in Asian religions; ethical issues in Asian religions; and religion and violence, among other topics. In 1994, she was awarded the Brutocao Award for Excellence in Curriculum Innovation, Santa Clara’s highest award for teaching, designed to recognize those teachers who have had a deep and lasting impact on the lives of students.

Ritual studies today figures as a central element of religious discourse for many scholars around the world. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice<$>, Catherine Bell's sweeping and seminal work on the subject, helped legitimize the field. In this volume, Bell re-examines the issues, methods, and ramifications of our interest in ritual by concentrating on anthropology, sociology, and the history of religions. Now with a new foreword by Diane Jonte-Pace, Bell's work is a must-read for understanding the evolution of the field of ritual studies and its current state.

Arguing that the concept of ritual is overdue for critical rethinking, Bell here offers a close theoretical analysis of recent developments in ritual studies, concentrating on anthropology, sociology, and history of religions. She begins by showing how discourse on ritual has served to generate and legitimate a limited and ultimately closed form of cultural analysis. She then proposes that so-called ritual activities be removed from their isolated position as special, paradigmatic acts and restored to the context of "social activity" in general. Using the term "ritualization" to describe ritual thus contextualized, she defines it as a culturally strategic way of acting. She goes on to show how this definition can serve to illuminate such classic issues in traditional ritual studies as belief, ideology, legitimation, and power.