My scholarship addresses material and visual cultures of religion as a historian of the United States, particularly in relation to visual regimes of race and nation, and in conversation with the discipline of religion. For a complete list of publications, see my CV.
BOOK
A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press, October 2017).
ARTICLES + CHAPTERS
“Documentary Photography and the Visual Politics of Race and Religion,” Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, eds. Paul Harvey and Kathryn Gin Lum (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
“Photography and Religion,” MacMillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, Volume 6: Material Religion, vol. ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappandona, series eds. Jeffrey Kripal, April DeConick, and Anthony Pinn (MacMillan, 2016).
"'Mirror of All Perfection': Jesus and the Strongman in America," American Quarterly, 68.1 (March 2016)
“‘This Barbarous Practice’: Southern Churchwomen in the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942,” Journal of Southern Religion 16 (2014).
“’Seen and Read of Men’: Biblical Text and the Living Epistles of Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement," Journal of Africana Religions 2.3 (2014), 347-378.
“Bodies on Display” and “Haunting the Streets of Cairo: Visual Habits in Nineteenth-century Holy Land Photography,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 43.2 (2014), 2-4, 4-11.
DIGITAL PROJECTS
Lived Religion in the Digital Age. Co-director, with Pauline Lee, Ph.D. (Saint Louis University). Interdisciplinary digital humanities initiative to gather and map local, lived religious sounds, spaces, objects, and stories, and to scrutinize the translation of these experiences into digital products. Supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. 2018-
“Collections: A Communion of Shadows,” Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, Yale University, mavcor.yale.edu. This project was coordinated through UNC and Yale in connection with my book, A Communion of Shadows, in order to publish material associated with the study on an open-source digital platform.
Arch City Religion, www.archcityreligion.org. Teaching project mapping religious spaces, objects, and communities in the St. Louis metro with students at Saint Louis University and Webster University. This project, and the courses that contribute to it, has been profiled in Universitas, the alumni magazine of SLU, and Newslink, SLU’s biweekly campus newsletter.
American Religious Sounds Project, http://religioussounds.osu.edu. Pilot-site collaborator. PIs Isaac Weiner (Ohio State University) and Amy DeRogatis (Michigan State University). Spring 2018.
OTHER REFEREED PUBLICATIONS
“The Dangerous Power of the Photo-Op,” Religion and Politics, June 9, 2020.
“French King, Catholic Saint, American Icon: Provoking Religion, Race, and Public Memory in an American City,” American Religion (June 2020).
“American Milagros: Michael Tracy’s Borderlands of Sacred Art and State Violence,” Political Theology Network (April 1, 2019).
“Borderlands of the Sacred: Religion, Objects, and the American State on the Southern U.S. Border,” The Immanent Frame (October 30, 2018)
“An Ozarks Native Crosses the Show-Me State,” Religion & Politics (September 18, 2018).
"'Cannot Tell Aught But the Truth': Photography and Birth of a Nation (1915)," Sacred Matters: Religious Currents in Culture (May 2016)
“Agents of a Fuller Revelation,” Web blog post. Material Religions (2015)
“Carte de visite Photograph Album,” Object Narrative, in Conversations: An Online Journal of the Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (2014).
“Passages: A Glimpse into the Hobby Lobby’s Family Museum,” Religion & Politics (September 2014).
“Pulled into the Maze”: 12 Years a Slave (2013), Religion & Politics (February 2014).