Assistant Professor

CV | tisa.wenger@yale.edu Phone:203-432-2493
Website:Religion in the American West

Professor Wenger’s research and teaching interests include the history of “religion” as a cultural category, the politics of religious freedom, religion in the American West, and the intersections between ideologies of race and religion as they impact Native Americans and other racial/religious minorities in U.S. history. Her book We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom shows how dominant conceptions of religion and religious freedom affected the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico as they sought to protect their religious ceremonies from government suppression, and how that struggle helped reshape mainstream views of religion and the politics of Indian affairs. Among her current writing projects is a new book that will examine the limitations and sometimes unintended consequences of religious freedom as a foundational American ideal. Like We Have a Religion, this research asks how culturally specific formations of religion and religious freedom shape the dynamics of religious encounter and pluralism in America. Other publications include articles in History of Religions, Journal of the Southwest, and Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, along with chapters in several edited volumes.

Quote

"To some degree, setting apart certain ceremonies or certain land as 'religious' or 'sacred' creates a new distinction between these spheres of life and others that come to be marked in opposition as 'secular' or 'profane.' As in the dance controversy, the introduction of such terms may change the ways in which Native Americans view their own traditions. However… these concepts have become indigenous ones, and Indians have actively reinterpreted them to fulfill indigenous needs." (265)

Education

Ph.D., Princeton University
M.A., Claremont Graduate University
B.A., Eastern Mennonite University

Books

We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)