Department Faculty

“I am a historian of American culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with an emphasis on religion. My research and teaching focus on the challenges modern society poses to religion and how Americans of many backgrounds have adapted their traditions to new situations. My writing mainly concerns Western religions active in America before the 1960s, and I am especially interested in the interactions among them in families, as shown in my Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America (2001) and "Some Private Roads to Rome: The Role of Families in American Victorian Conversions to Catholicism" (1999). Most often my subjects have been religious liberals who wished to modify tradition in order to preserve faith. I highlighted the reform impulse in transcendentalism in Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850 (1981) and explored how Americans of the Victorian generation used the Civil War to forge a new sense of purpose in Victorian America and the Civil War (1992). My current research on the rise of the psychological sciences in the Jim Crow South (1896-1965) examines how a Protestant region responded to new theories of the mind and particularly how race counterbalanced religious conservatism, as the southern black community embraced psychological approaches to personhood to contest segregation. "Putting the South on the Psychological Map: The Impact of Region and Race on the Human Sciences during the 1930s" (2005) sets the regional story in a national context.”