Visiting Fellows
2012-2013 Fellows
The Center for the Study of Religion is pleased to announce the selection of the 2012-2013 Visiting Fellows.
Fellows devote the major portion of their time to research and writing on their own works-in-progress, while also participating in various activities of the Center, including symposia, conferences, and public lectures. Funding for research on Christian Thought and Practice is provided through a grant from the Lilly Endowment.
Andrew Johnson received his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota in 2012. His research focuses on Christian practice inside of prison, and he is currently finishing his dissertation on Pentecostalism inside of the prisons of Rio de Janiero, Brazil. His work examines why this type of Christianity thrives among inmate populations and the broad social consequences of religious prisoners. While at Princeton, Andrew will work on a project comparing the religious practice of inmates in Brazil and the United States as well as turning his dissertation into a book manuscript.
Daniel Vaca received his Ph.D. in Religion from Columbia University in 2012. His research explores how interactions between Christianity and commerce have oriented the religious thought, practice, and self-understanding of Christians in North America. While at Princeton, Daniel will be working on two book projects. Book People: Evangelical Books and the Making of Contemporary Evangelicalism traces the twentieth-century history of evangelical book culture. Based on a dissertation that received support from the Louisville Institute, the Lilly Endowment, and the Whiting Foundation, Daniel's work both explains how evangelical books came to rank among American history's bestsellers and illustrates how books helped evangelicals to see themselves as members of a common Christian community. Daniel's second project explores the history of Christian fundraising in the United States, highlighting the diverse constellations of belief, behavior, law, and economy that have configured habits of voluntary giving.
Affiliate Fellows
Martha L. Finch is an associate professor of North American religious history at Missouri State University. She received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the author of Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). At the CSR she will be working on a book manuscript, “Outward Adornment: Plain Dress in American Protestantism,” that uncovers the ways many groups, from early New England congregationalists to twentieth-century pentecostals, attempted to regulate clothing, hairstyles, and so on in order to materialize their particular understandings of worldliness, holiness, gender, social status, and group identity and to negotiate their relationships to larger cultural influences, such as fashion, commercialization, consumerism, and feminism.
Samuel Goldman received his Ph.D. in Political Science in 2010. His dissertation, The Shadow of God: Strauss, Jacobi, and the Theologico-Political Problem was awarded the Robert Noxon Toppan Prize for the Best Dissertation on a Subject of Political Science by the Department of Government at Harvard University. Goldman is currently revising it for publication. Goldman’s teaching interests include: secularization theories, the political thought of the Enlightenment, and German idealism. In addition to scholarly publications, his writing has appeared in The American Conservative, The New Criterion, and Maximumrocknroll.
Daniel Rivers is Associate Research Scholar with the Council of the Humanities. He is a historian whose research interests include Native American history, women and gender in the United States, histories of the family and sexuality, and U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history. His book, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and their Children in the United States since the Second World War, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2013. His current research examines Choctaw women’s negotiation of Christian identity, the family, sexuality, and capitalism in the post-removal period (1870-1910).
