ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Urban Religions and a member of ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½’s Urban Research Cluster. My research examines the mutually transformative relationships between the built environment and American religious life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—a perspective shaped by the conceptual tools of urban and infrastructure studies.

My research and writing are motivated by a curiosity about how religious ideas delivered outside the normal channels of religious instruction shape everyday spaces, as well as a fascination with historical moments when people not usually considered meaningful agents of religious authority leveraged religious narratives to enact large-scale infrastructural transformations. My historical research proceeds in conversation with a range of core anthropological, religious studies, and urban studies debates about the relationship between space, place, and power, and I experiment with methodological approaches designed to show how American religious phenomena speak to nominally secular archives of American political, economic, and urban development, and vice versa.

I am currently working on my first book, Apostles of Asphalt: The Religious Politics of Infrastructure in the American South, which is under contract with Columbia University Press. It shows how the builders of early highways in the Jim Crow-Era South came to see themselves as secular missionaries literally building a modern and distinctly southern gospel of American civilization and progress into the landscape. You can read more about the project .

I have published a range of articles and essays that contribute to the study of religion, infrastructure, and urbanism, and I am excited to pursue a number of new projects while at ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½. At the moment, I am researching the relationship between religious tourism and corporate city-planning, the religious politics of water and agribusiness in the American West, the formative connections between canonical theories of religion and theories of the city, and the impact of twentieth-century religious eclecticism on architectural modernism and urban planning.

Before joining the faculty at ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½, I served as an Arts & Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. I have taught religious studies courses at UToronto and UNC-Chapel Hill, and U.S. urban and business history courses in the Department of History and Geography at Elon University. I was also a 2024-2025 Robert M. Kingdon Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Outside of my research and teaching duties, I am a consulting Research Associate for the ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½ for Religion and Cities, and an advisory board member of the Federation for Infrastructure Scholars in the Humanities (FISH). I also serve on the steering committees of two program units affiliated with the American Academy of Religion: The Space, Place, and Religion Unit, and the Religion and Cities Unit.