Contact me by email or c/o Religious Studies                 CB# 3225 125 Saunders Chapel Hill, NC 27599

I am a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies and a Royster Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I also serve as a Senior Research Fellow at Auburn Media, helping build a community of scholars who work on the intersection of religion and media. My dissertation is titled “Global Village: Religious Imaginaries, Communication Technology, and the World they Made for America.” In 1858, when the Atlantic telegraph cable was first successfully strung across the ocean, Americans declared the advent of a world unified by communication and marked by the ends of distance and war. This persistent rhetoric animated what it meant to be modern and American and today echoes in claims that the internet creates a global village. My dissertation focuses on religious and public writing about the Atlantic telegraph to illustrate how American Christianities shaped the invention of a world unified by communication. My research interests include Religion in America, 19th century America, communication technologies, social imaginaries, publics, contemporary critical thought, and cultural studies.

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