Department Faculty

"I am a historian of American culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with an emphasis on the histories of religion and science. My research and teaching focus on the challenges modern society poses to religious belief and scientific thinking. Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South (2009) explores the way racial inequality restrained the development of the psychological sciences in one American region. Earlier, I examined private religious discussions within families as catalysts of public tolerance in Beloved Strangers: Interfaith Families in Nineteenth-Century America (2001). My studies on religious liberals who sought to modify tradition in order to advance social justice and also preserve faith include Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850 (1981) and Victorian America and the Civil War (1992). My current book project concerns the problem that the scientific study of emotion presented to the rising discipline of psychology at the turn of the twentieth century."