About

Biography and Interests

I am a teacher and researcher who studies religion, culture, and politics with a historical focus on the United States. My current project is on religious fanaticism as an object of secular policing. You may read more about my current work on my Research page. Since Fall 2020, I have been an assistant professor at Iowa State University in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.

Going as far back as high school, growing up in Mesa, Arizona, I have been interested in studying religious traditions and communities in their historical and cultural contexts. The building blocks that we associate with religion—ideas about supernatural beings, obligatory rituals, sacred texts, insider and outsider communities, passionate energies, the purpose of humanity—are difficult to study because of common ideas about religion’s other-worldliness and its reduction to individualized “sincere belief.” The building blocks of religion, however, are relevant for studying culture, politics, and social formation in this world. The academic study of religion provides tools to do this type of analysis.

In college, studying history and literature at Arizona State University, I wrote paper after paper about how religious traditions defined themselves in contrast to one another while at the same time being informed by cross-cultural exchanges. I dug into sources about diverse religions, from paganism to Christianity in Beowulf to indigenous African practices in the Black Atlantic to Catholic-Protestant debates in early modern England. I wanted to understand why religious difference has been such a source of social formation and conflict. My studies were historical in nature, but the questions I was asking were based on the twenty-first century. This includes the events of September 11 and the emergence of the US War on Terror. I wanted to be able to intelligently respond to questions such as: How have Americans identified which forms of religion are good and which forms of religion are bad for the US? What are the politics and assumptions behind these delineations?

These types of questions fueled my research into the historical categories of “religion” and its others (“fanaticism,” “superstition,” “cults,” etc.) as well as my investment in exploring diverse forms of belonging and imagination across religious traditions. The more I studied, the more complex these questions became.

Seeking an MA at Florida State, I studied American religious history with a focus on Catholicism. My MA thesis, “The Church of St. Benedict the Moor: Propagating and Contesting Black Catholicism in New York City, 1883–1920,” examined the first Black Catholic parish in New York City. It attends to the perspective of the white Irish-dominant Catholic hierarchy and the varieties of Black attendees, some of whom saw the Church useful and attractive for their personal lives and political aspirations.

My dissertation, “Policing Fanaticism, Religion, & Race in the American Empire, 1830–1930,” examined the popularization of the terminology of fanaticism in the nineteenth century, focusing on how it served as a term of marginalizing and securitizing religious and racial minorities.