Scholarship
Monograph
Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America (Cornell University Press, 2020)
Heaven's Interpreters argues that nineteenth-century American women writers fictionalized theological questions as a means of imagining new forms of agency. Studies of nineteenth-century fiction have too often treated women's religious writing as evidence of an unfortunate fall, marred by feminization, commercialization, and theological decline. Heaven's Interpreters rewrites these narratives, arguing that women writers used theology to vivify a wide range of literary forms, employing historical, abolitionist, sentimental, domestic, and spiritualist novels as forums for engaging in doctrinal and ecclesiastical debates. Not content with dry theological wrangling, women authors imagined new models of agency that were both legible according to longstanding religious traditions and productive of new modes of being. By claiming theology for themselves and their readers, these popular women writers transformed both American Christianity and the literary public sphere.
The book can be purchased from Cornell University Press. Thanks to Virginia Tech's involvement in the TOME initiative, Heaven's Interpreters is also available in a free, open-access edition.
Articles and Essays
"Hope Leslie and the Grounds of Secularism." ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, vol. 66, no. 1, 2020, pp. 88-131. DOI: 10.1353/esq.2020.0004.
"'I Have No Disbelief': Spiritualism and Secular Agency in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons." J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, vol. 55, no. 1, 2017, pp. 151-177. DOI: 10.1353/jnc.2017.0008.
"Digital Humanities and the Study and Teaching of North American Religions." Religion Compass, vol. 10, no. 2, 2016, pp. 307-316. DOI: 10.1111/rec3.12226.
"Craft and Care: The Maker Movement, Catherine Blake, and the Digital Humanities." Essays in Romanticism, vol. 23, no. 1, 2016, pp. 23-38.
"Managing an Established Digital Humanities Project: Principles and Practices from the Twentieth Year of the William Blake Archive." Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 1, 2014.
"The Trials and Errors of Building Prudence Person's Scrapbook: An Annotated Digital Edition." Teaching with Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods for Nineteenth-Century American Literature, edited by Jennifer Travis and Jessica DeSpain, University of Illinois Press, 2018, pp. 24-43.