2022-2023 Symposium
The Williams P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at ÃÛÌÒ½´Methodist University and the examined religion in the North American West in a two-part symposium to workshop their papers leading to an edited volume. The symposium and resulting volume will examine the religious, spiritual, and secular histories of the Trans-Mississippi West, focusing on the West(s) created by the contact of settler-colonists, migrants, and indigenous peoples from the 16th to 21st centuries.Participants include:
* Jim Bennett (Santa Clara University), “The West Coast Origins of the Anti-cult Movement”;
* Carleigh Beriont (Harvard University), “Ever ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes’: American Religion and the U.S. West in the 20th Century Pacific”;
* Tom Bremer (Rhodes College), "Icons of Whiteness: Race and Religion in US National Parks";
* Jon Garcia (University of ÃÛÌÒ½´California), "There Will be Blood: Atonement and Agency in 19th Century Penitente Communities"
* Lynne Gerber (Independent Scholar), “Dealing with the Sacred and Religious: AIDS, Religion, and Spirituality in San Francisco’s Ward 5B”;
* Jen Graber (University of Texas-Austin), “Life in a Cannibal Country: Chinese and Paiute Rites of Care and Feeding”;
* Maxwell Greenberg (Washington-St. Louis University), “Jewish "Pioneers' Cemeteries: Preserving and Exhuming the Myth of Religions Freedom in the America West”;
* Brennan Keegan (College of Charleston), “The Working West: Religion, Labor, and the Making of Western Spaces”;
* Nicole Kirk (Meadville Lombard Theological School), “Circus Religion”;
* Andrew Klumpp (State Historical Society of Iowa), “Dutch Calvinist Imperials in the Trans-Mississippi West: Dispossession, Community Building, and Global Engagement in the Nineteenth Century”;
* Chrissy Yee Lau (California State University-Monterey Bay), “The Expansion of St. Mary's Japanese Episcopal Mission in the Interwar Era;”
* Quincy D. Newell (Hamilton College), “Thoroughly Secular Saints: Enacting Modernity in Utah during the 1918 Influenza Epidemic”;
* Joshua Paddison (Texas State University), “Thomas Lake Harris: ‘Cults,’ and the American West”
Participants met twice to present and workshop their papers: once at SMU’s satellite campus in Taos, New Mexico, in the fall of 2022, and a second time at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis, in spring 2023. Conference co-conveners, Brandi Denison (University of North Florida) and Brett Hendrickson (Lafayette College) will edit the papers and convene the workshops.
For more information about the symposium, contact the conference co-conveners or the Clements Center for Southwest Studies.