REL715:
History of Modern Christianity: American Encounters, Postmodern Transformations
Co-taught with Professor Erika Helgen
This class focuses on critical encounters among peoples who have contributed to the development of modern Christian cultures in the Americas from the eighteenth century to the present. It does not aim to provide an exhaustive history of religion (or even of Christianity) in North America and Latin America, but rather highlights key topics such as race, class, gender, and sexuality and the dynamics of imperialism, modernity, and postmodernity in religious history. Students are challenged to consider various methods for interpreting the past, to develop their own skills of historical interpretation, and to locate their own communities as products of the histories we consider.
This course introduces students to the historiography of religious history; to the history of methods, approaches, and problems in the field; and to techniques for using and citing primary and secondary sources in the study of religion. Seminars include lectures, common readings, writing exercises, and presentations by students and visiting scholars. Students develop research proposals related to their specific areas of interest.
REL718/RLST 686:
Religion in the American West
This course investigates the histories of religious encounter and the formation of diverse religious identities in the American West, placing them in broader contexts of Atlantic world, Pacific world, hemispheric, and national histories. The West has played multiple roles in the nation’s imagination: a place to be conquered and controlled, a place for new beginnings (religious or otherwise), a place of perils and of opportunities. Over the course of the term we ponder the religious dimensions of each of these constructed meanings and examine their very real impact on the people and landscapes of the West.
REL720:
Religious Freedom in US History
Religious freedom is often affirmed as a founding principle of the United States. A familiar narrative of progress charts the development of the founders' original goal of ensuring liberty for competing Protestant denominations towards the eventual inclusion of Jews, Catholics, and—at least ideally—those who practice any of the world's religions. Without entirely unseating that narrative, this course aims to complicate it by interrogating the cultural biases, exclusions, and limitations as well as apparent successes of religious freedom over the course of U.S. history. Along the way we will address key topics including the histories of toleration and secularism, First Amendment jurisprudence, the struggles of religious minorities, debates over school prayer and gay marriage, the fraught role of the chaplain, and the problematics of religious freedom in U.S. foreign policy.
REL728/AMST 804:
Religion and US Empire
Co-taught in fall 2020 with Professor Zareena Grewal
This course interrogates the multiple intersections between religion and U.S. empire. It asks not only how Christianity and other religious traditions have facilitated and enabled empire, and how they have served as resources for resistance, but also how the categories of “religion” and the “secular” were assembled as imperial products alongside modern formations of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Students learn to see religion and the secular as historical formations alongside race, class, gender, and sexuality, and to critically interrogate their intersections with empire. In an online forum, seminar discussions, and two papers, students develop the analytical and writing skills that are the building blocks of all scholarship in the humanities.
REL730:
Native Americans and Christianity
This course examines the complex and often painful history of American Indian encounters with Christianity in colonial North America and the United States. Moving from the early colonial period to the present, and with particular attention to Native American voices, we explore a variety of indigenous responses to Catholic and Protestant missions and the development of distinctively Native Christian traditions. Along the way, the course interrogates and historicizes key trends in the study of indigenous Christianity, including Red-Power era critiques of missions, the influence of postcolonial theory, and the recent emphasis on indigenous Christian agency. Students build critical awareness of the historical intersections of colonialism and Christianity; apply postcolonial frameworks to understand the role of Christianity in indigenous communities; and develop skills in historical analysis.
REL759:
Land, Ecology, and Religion in US History
This course explores the varied intersections between land, ecology, and religion in U.S. history and situates American religion within a broader history of the Anthropocene. How have religious ideologies and institutions worked to shape American spaces, places, and landscapes? In an age of accelerating ecological crisis, how have diverse religious groups interacted with, participated in, or reacted against the environmental movement? How have race, gender, settler colonialism, and other intersectional social formations shaped these histories? How are the social formations we call religions implicated in and reinvented by the climactic transformations of the Anthropocene?
REL763:
Primary Readings in American Christianity
The United States changed dramatically in the period between the Civil War and the Second World War. Reconstruction, unprecedented levels of immigration, westward expansion, a newly global U.S. empire, progressive social reforms, the growth of scientific and popular racism, the First World War, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression all left indelible marks on American cultural and religious life. What role did Christianity play in these historical developments, and how were Christian traditions transformed in the process? This seminar addresses these questions with a focus on selected primary sources, written by men and women representing a wide range of Christian traditions, regions, and racial/ethnic backgrounds.
AMST 705a/HIST 720a/RLST 705a:
This seminar explores intersections of religion and society in American history from the colonial period to the present as well as methodological problems important to their study. It is designed to give graduate students a working knowledge of the field, ranging from major recent studies to bibliographical tools. In short, the seminar is a broad readings course surveying religion in American history from colonization to the present. It is not a specialized research seminar, but it does require a basic understanding of historiography.