Meet the Faculty

Kathryn Lofton

• Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies
• Assistant Professor, Program in American Studies

Education

• Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2005

Contact Information

Background

What does it mean to be “religious”? How do scholars identify the religious subject, and how do these subjects imagine themselves? My research focuses on the problem of religious identity and classification in the Americas during the last two centuries. Although my primary research materials are drawn from subjects within U.S. religious history, theoretical dilemmas motivate my documentary investments: How do we define "religion"? What is particular about the development of religion in the U.S.? For me, religious studies offers an important intellectual space to answer the questions of history simultaneous with those of classification.

To that end, my book-in-progress, tentatively titled The Modernity in Mr. Shaw: Modernisms and Fundamentalisms in American Culture, offers a microhistory of conservative American Protestantism through the life of one Presbyterian fundamentalist, John Balcom Shaw (1860-1935), an editor of The Fundamentals who was remitted from the ministry following accusations of sodomy in 1918. Using Shaw’s biography as the narrative backbone, I trace the ways that religious orthodoxy, sexual identity, and modern definitions of the self commingled during an epoch of profound technological, social, and economic transformation.

In addition to this research, I have also explored the religious contours of Oprah Winfrey’s multimedia empire and the meaning of masculinity studies within contemporary humanist research. Future projects include a religious history of American happiness, which will be a broad survey traveling from the hardscrabble early national frontier of Lorenzo Dow to the pillow-strewn late-twentieth century meditation retreats of Marianne Williamson. Alongside this book-length project, I am also researching the relationship between Scientology and celebrity, as well as the religious histories of common commodities.

Research Interests

• U.S. Religious History
• Fundamentalisms and Modernisms
• Religion and Popular Culture
• Race, Religion, and Ethnicity
• Methods and Approaches to the Study of Religion

Courses Recently Taught

• Religion in Early America
• Finding Indiana
• Religion and Modern America
• Religion and Popular Culture

Publication Highlights

“Queering Fundamentalism: John Balcom Shaw and the Sexuality of a Protestant Orthodoxy,” The Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17:3 (September 2008).

“Public Confessions: Oprah Winfrey’s American Religious History,”
forthcoming in a 2008 special issue of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, “The Oprah Winfrey Talk Show and Civil Society.”

"The Preacher Paradigm: Biographical Promotions and the Modern-Made Evangelist,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 16:1 (Winter 2006).

"Practicing Oprah; Or, The Prescriptive Compulsion of a Spiritual Capitalism,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 39:4 (August 2006).

"The Methodology of the Modernists: Process in American Protestantism,”
Church History: Studies of Christianity and Culture, 75:2 (June 2006).

“Practice and Piety,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religion in American History, Philip Goff, ed. (Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming).

“Global Reach (1898-Present): Cosmology,” in Religion and American History, Amanda Porterfield and John Corrigan, eds. (Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming).

“The Perpetual Primitive in African American Religious Historiography,”in The New Black Gods: African American Religions after the Great Migration, Edward E. Curtis IV and Danielle Brune, eds. (Indiana University Press, forthcoming).