I am a historian of American religion working on the cultural politics of freedom, the formation of “religion” under settler colonial regimes, and the intersections of race, religion, and empire in U.S. history. My next book, “How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion,” focuses on the early nineteenth-century Northwest Territory and argues that settler colonial encounters shaped both religious practices and the category of religion in the early national United States. A Guggenheim Fellowship for 2021-2022 provided generous support for this project.

My first two books are We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2017). Most recently, with Sylvester Johnson, I co-edited Religion and U.S. Empire: Critical New Histories (New York University Press, 2022), and edited a special issue of the Pacific Historical Review, on religion in the nineteenth-century American West, forthcoming in summer 2023.

As of January 2023, I am co-editor, with Mitsutoshi Horii, of the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. With Laura Olson (Clemson University) and Leslie Griffin (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), I co-edit the University of Kansas Press book series Studies in US Religion, Politics, and Law. I also sit on the editorial board for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

I have taught at Yale University since 2009. Before Yale I taught at the Department of Religious Studies at Arizona State University (2004-2009) and held a Bill and Rita Clements Research Fellowship at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies (2002-2003). I hold a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University, an M.A. from Claremont Graduate University, and a B.A. from Eastern Mennonite University.

I live in Hamden, Connecticut with my husband Rod Groff and our three children, Jordan, Sophia, and Dylan. I enjoy gardening (vegetables, fruit, herbs, and all sorts of perennials) and the crafts of fermenting and seasonal cooking.