The Ohio River Valley was the site of an intense rivalry between Protestants and Catholics in the nineteenth century, as members of each group vied to extend their control through the development of churches, schools, orphanages, and other institutions. This dissertation explores the process and analyzes the effects of Catholic...
One of the pressing concerns of the fifteenth century was monastic reform, and reformers of the Observant movement rose to meet the challenge by attempting to return monastic houses to stricter observance of their earliest rules and governing documents. In this dissertation, I examine how Dominican nuns in German-speaking parts...
This dissertation purposely prioritizes Tibetan and Himalayan tsunmas’ perspectives on the topic of restoring a full ordination lineage for ordained women. To do so, it examines the gendered landscapes of Buddhist women’s ordination, which has been a contentious issue throughout Buddhism’s twenty-six-hundred-year history, beginning with the Buddha’s eventual acceptance of...
This dissertation investigates how US Americans in the nineteenth century began to apply the category of religious fanaticism to individuals and communities deemed dangerous. Contributing to scholarship on secularism, racial governance, and American religious history, this dissertation argues that fanaticism is not a neutral category of description. It tracks how...
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian Orthodox Church established a dense network of social and material aid for thousands of migrants who travelled from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires to find work in the United States. The church’s growth followed the path of Progressive Era industrialization, with...
This dissertation is a history of religious conservatism between 1880 and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Its main argument is that conservative religion in America, rather than being defined by fundamentalism, theological disputes, or cultural antipathy towards pluralism, was an outgrowth of a profound faith in capitalism...