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I am a cultural and historical anthropologist of religion. I am especially interested in the many different histories, cultural practices, and social effects of Christianity in the world. My work uses lenses from feminist theory and material religion studies to trace the interplay of gendered bodies, spaces, and words in particular social situations.
My first book, Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850-1890 (Brill, 2013), examined how place-making practices on and around new "mission stations" shaped understandings of Christianity, gender, and race in colonial Southern Africa. My second book, Life in Language: Mission Feminists and the Emergence of a New Protestant Subject (Chicago, 2025), explores the often problematic connection between "women" and "words" in Christianity. I focus on a case study of the so-called "mission feminists" in early-twentieth-century Norway - a group of women who used new language practices (new ways of speaking, listening, reading, and writing) to advocate for women's greater status in Christian organizations. Their linguistic experiments combined their words and their bodies in different material-discursive configurations. While scholars often argue that Protestantism drives toward dematerialization, aiming to separate language from materiality, the mission feminists show us the opposite: they give us a glimpse into the material-discursive multiplicity of Protestant modern subject. The book is forthcoming from the Class 200 series at Chicago in March 2025. I have also thought about student reading in humanities classes. I teach at the University of Georgia, where my classes include "Women in Christian History," "Women in World Religions," and "Feminist Theories." |
ContactEmail: [email protected]
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Research topics:
Life in LanguageWhat happens when Christian women try to forge new connections between themselves and words, experimenting with new ways of writing, reading, listening, and speaking?
Setting: The "mission feminists" in Norway during the time of the first-wave women's movement. |
Meeting minutes of the Kristiania chapter of the Female Teachers' Mission Association (LMF), 1923. The Mission Archives, Stavanger.
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Mission Station ChristianityHow does Christian place-making affect how Christianity is practiced? How does it affect ideas about gendered and racialized bodies within those spaces?
Setting: Norwegian mission stations in Southern Africa during the time of British colonial expansion. |
Watercolor of Umpumulo mission station in the Natal Colony by missionary Hans Christian Leisegang, 1866. The Mission Archives, Stavanger.
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ReadingHow do understandings of reading as a research subject relate to how we use reading as a scholarly method in our work and to how we teach discipline-specific reading to students in our university classes? In addition to exploring the role that reading plays in my historical case studies, I have also begun conducting classroom (SOTL) studies of student reading.
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Excerpt of a student's reading map from the class "Women in Christian History"
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