Tisa Wenger

Professor Wenger’s research and teaching interests include religious encounters in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, especially the U.S. West; the cultural politics of religious freedom; and the intersections of race, religion, and empire in American history. Before joining the YDS faculty, Professor Wenger taught at Arizona State University and held a Bill and Rita Clements Research Fellowship at Southern Methodist University’s Clements Center for Southwest Studies. Wenger’s books include We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (2009) and Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017). She has published essays in many edited collections and academic journals. Most recently, with Sylvester Johnson, she co-edited Religion and U.S. Empire: Critical New Histories (2022).

Wenger currently serves as one of three series editors for the University Press of Kansas book series, Studies in US Religion, Politics, and Law. As of January 2023, she also co-edits the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. Her next book, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021-2022, will show how settler colonialism shaped and governed religion in the nineteenth-century United States, serving as the unacknowledged framework for the historical development of American religion. You can learn more about Wenger’s research and teaching at https://www.tisawenger.net/

Books

1. Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
2. We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)