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, Wenger taught at Arizona State University for five years 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), Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017), and the co-edited Religion and U.S. Empire: Critical New Histories (2022). Her next book, How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion, was supported in part by a Guggenheim Fellowship and is forthcoming in 2025 with the University of North Carolina Press.   

Wenger serves as co-editor of the University Press of Kansas book series, Studies in US Religion, Politics, and Law and of the academic journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion. You can learn more about her research and teaching at https://www.tisawenger.net/

Books

1. We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
2. Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2017)
3. Religion and U.S. Empire: Critical New Histories, co-edited with Sylvester Johnson (New York University Press, 2022)
4. How Settler Colonialism Made American Religion (University of North Carolina Press, 2025)