Currently, I am a Ph.D student at Princeton University studying Religion in America.
My research interests involve understanding how religious worlds get constructed and how those worlds are interacted with by the social actors who construct them. This has led me to investigate the creation and function of scripture as a category. I am interested in understanding how scripture is used as a tool by social actors to navigate the world. My areas of emphasis are philosophical phenomenology, race, social theory, gender, feminist theory, and 19th century American religion.
My MA was awarded to me by the University of Alabama where I majored in Religion in Culture. At Alabama, I was interested in The Book of Mormon and how it was initially received by the public in 1830. This interest culminated into my master’s project titled: “The Public’s Response to the Book of Mormon: A Critical Phenomenology of Scripture”. The project was an experiment with topic modeling and a theoretically based paper. Within the paper, I used Heidegger’s concept of “readiness-to-hand”, Folkert’s typology of canon, and Bells textualization model, to understand how early Mormons and their critics appealed to broader conceptualizations of “scripture” to respectively articulate their own social goals.
I graduated from the University of Rochester with a bachelor’s degree with honors in Religious Studies and a minor in Clinical Psychology. My honors thesis, Asherah’s Decline: The Burning of Sacred Poles, was a diachronic analysis of the figure Asherah from the Late Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age.
