Sally M. Promey

Sally M. Promey is Caroline Washburn Professor of Religion and Visual Culture, with appointments in American Studies, Religious Studies, and Divinity (Institute of Sacred Music) and a faculty affiliation in History of Art. She is founding Director of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR). Prior to arriving in New Haven in 2007, she was chair and professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, where she taught for the first fifteen years of her career. 

Promey’s scholarship explores relations among visual/material/sensory/spatial cultures and religions in the United States from the colonial period through the present. She regularly teaches seminars on Materiality and Sensation, Religion and Museums, the (racial and religious) Performance of Space, Visual Controversies, Religion and American Law, and various other topics in Material Religion. Her most recent book, Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display (University of Chicago Press, 2024), shows how American public space is visibly saturated with religion. Analyzing the key histories of this dynamic exhibitionary aesthetics, she examines an expansive range of land-shaping practices, from street arts, parades and other public assemblies, vehicle décor, and varieties of signage to formal monuments, architectures, and zoning regulations. Her book exposes the strategic work of display as a Protestant technology of White nation formation and demonstrates how direct entanglements between Christianity’s mandate to evangelize and capitalism’s advertising idiom map this ideology’s spatial (auto)mobilities. Rooted in Anglo-Protestant exercise of imperial license to take space and invalidate competing religious practices, American design (as Promey shows) has invested in a distinctly White Protestant vision of heritage and racialized religiosity.

New and current projects include (1) a book-length volume titled Written on the Heart: Protestant Aesthetic Cultures in the United States (1600-2000), a study of American material religious “interiorities” in conversation with the recent work on “exterior” public display; (2) a shorter volume that re-considers and critiques the category “folk” with respect to its implications for religion and race; (3) a study of the indigenous Hawaiian religious foundations of American art criticism as shaped by James Jackson Jarvis’s early adulthood years among Protestant missionaries in Hawaiʻi and his misappropriations of Hawaiian practice (Jarvis is often named as the “first” American art critic; among scholars his story generally begins well after his travels in the islands). This project extends into the present, aiming to understand Hawaiian activist reassertions of traditional practices of religious and political aesthetics (including some of those “relocated” by Jarvis); and (4) a collaborative interdisciplinary curatorial project of exhibition and publication on the co-constitution of American artistic and religious modernities. 

Among earlier publications, Promey is contributing author to and editor of Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice (Yale University Press, 2014);  and coeditor, with Leigh E. Schmidt, of American Religious Liberalism (Indiana University Press, 2012) as well as co-editor, with David Morgan, of The Visual Culture of American Religions (University of California Press, 2001). Promey’s Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s “Triumph of Religion” at the Boston Public Library (Princeton, 1999) received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the historical study of religion, and Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Indiana, 1993) was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in American art. Selected articles and book chapters include essays titled “Testimonial Aesthetics and Public Display”; “Tree Rings and Bloodlines”; “Material Establishment and Public Display”; “Hearts and Stones: Material Transformation and the Stuff of American Christianities”; “Mirror Images: Framing the Self in Early New England Material Piety”; and “Taste Cultures and the Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940–1965.” 

She is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a residential fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, two Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowships (1993 and 2003) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. In 2001 she received the Regent’s Faculty Award for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity from the University System of Maryland, and in 2002 the Kirwan Faculty Research and Scholarship Prize, University of Maryland. In 2004 she was senior historian in residence for the Terra Summer Residency Program in Giverny, France. She serves on the editorial boards of Material Religion and Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture and is editorial adviser to American Art. She is an invited affiliate of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University in Montreal; and a National Research Fellow of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture in Indianapolis. Along with Editor and Curator Emily Floyd (University College London), she oversees the website and journal publication of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion. At Yale she has also been chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Deputy Director of the Institute of Sacred Music. She currently convenes the Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group. 

Books

1. Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display, University of Chicago Press, November 2024.
2. Editor, Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures and Material Practice, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
3. Co-editor with Leigh Eric Schmidt, American Religious Liberalism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
4. Co-editor with David Morgan, The Visual Culture of American Religions, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
5. Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s “Triumph of Religion” at the Boston Public Library, Princeton University Press, 1999.
6. Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism, Indiana University Press, 1993.