Religious Studies: Tisa Wenger

Professor of Religious Studies
Ph.D., Princeton University, 2002
Arrived at ASU: 2004

Office: ECA 310
Phone: (480) 727 - 6111 or 965-7145
E-mail: Tisa.Wenger@asu.edu
CV: (PDF)

Research Interests

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. religion, race and religious encounters, religion in the U.S. West, religion in public life, Christian missions, and the cultural history of the study of religion.

Biography

Tisa Wenger (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Assistant Professor of American Religions. Before she came to ASU, she was Acting Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, and held a Bill and Rita Clements Fellowship at Southern Methodist University's Clements Center for Southwest Studies.

Dr. Wenger's forthcoming book, The Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and the Cultural Invention of Religion in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2008), analyzes the political implications of cultural ideas about "religion" and "religious freedom" in U.S. Indian policy and Native American life. She is currently beginning work on her second book, which will address the historical formations of ideologies of race, religion, and nation among Protestant missionaries in the American west.

Courses Taught

REL 320 - Religion in America
REL 405 - Religion, Politics, and Protest in the U.S.
REL 405 - Religion in the American West
REL 405 - Race and Religion in the Americas
REL 591/691 - Defining Religion in American Public Life
REL 591/691 - Missions and Missionaries in the Americas

REL 691 - The Study of Religion in North America

Selected Publications

“The Practice of Dance for the Future of Christianity: ‘Eurythmic Worship’ in New York’s Roaring Twenties,” in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, edited by Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 222-249.

“Modernists, Pueblo Indians, and the Politics of Primitivism,” in Race, Religion, Region: Landscapes of Encounter in the American West, edited by Fay Botham and Sara Patterson (University of Arizona Press, 2006), 101-114.

“‘We Are Guaranteed Freedom’: Pueblo Indians and the Category of Religion in the 1920s.” History of Religions 45:2 (November 2005), 89-113

“Land, Culture, and Sovereignty in the Pueblo Dance Controversy.” Journal of the Southwest 16:2 (Fall 2004), 381-412.

“Female Christ and Feminist Foremother: The Many Lives of Ann Lee.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 18:2 (Fall 2002), 5-32.