Dana Logan

Dr. Logan is a scholar of American religion and ritual who works on the history of evangelicalism, civil society in the nineteenth-century United States, and the experience of ritual in everyday life. Her forthcoming book, Awkward Ritual: Sensations of Governance in Protestant Civil Society, argues that political ritual can be boring, sacred authority can be drab, and earnest ritual can be awkward. Ritual as a category, Logan shows, does not always create a synthesis between bodily feeling and ideological commitments.

Most recently she has been researching Baptist discipline in the antebellum South. She is interested in the relationship between spiritual discipline and policing in American history. All of her work theorizes the blurred lines between governance, work, consumerism, and ritual. She teaches classes on the history of American religion, evangelicalism, “cults,” race and religion, and the role of religion in celebrity culture. She loves Shakers, narratives where children are raised in the wild, and coywolves.

EDUCATION

Indiana University, Bloomington (2015)
Ph.D. Religious Studies,
Minor in American Studies
Dissertation: “Uncivil Rituals: Civil Religion and Democracy in New York City, 1780-1850”
Committee Members: Candy Gunther Brown, Richard B. Miller, Micol Seigel, and Wendy Gamber

Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA (2009)
MTS, History of Christianity

Reed College, Portland, OR (2007)
BA, American Studies-Religious Studies

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

Awkward Ritual: Sensations of Governance in Protestant Civil Society, forthcoming with University of Chicago Press, Class 200 Series.

“Ritual Chores: Catherine Beecher’s Domesticity,” forthcoming in Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2021.

“Shaker Fan Fic,” American Religion 1, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 121-126.

“The Lean Closet: Asceticism in Post-Industrial Consumerism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85, no. 3 (September, 2017): 600-628.

“Circulating Sin: Black Sailors and Benevolence in Early Nineteenth-Century New York,” in Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power ed. Micol Seigel (New York: Routledge, 2018).

“Lydia Maria Child and the Urbanity of Religious Cosmopolitanism in Antebellum New York City,” The Journal of Urban History, article first published online: April 16, 2015 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144215578605

INVITED PUBLICATIONS

“What Would a Religious History of Goop Look Like?” in “Roundtable on the Lean Closet: Asceticism in Post-Industrial Consumerism,” Bulletin for the Study of Religion 47, no. 3-4 (September-December 2018): 14-18.

“Republicanism: Religious Studies and Church History meet Political History,” in “Forum on Antebellum American Protestantism,” Church History 84, no. 3 (September 2015): 621-624.

ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES

“Commerce, Consumerism, and Christianity in America,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Religion in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

“Orphanages,” “Alexander Griswold,” “Elias Hicks,” “James B. Finley,” “Ezra Stiles Gannett,” and “Lewis Wallace,” in Encyclopedia of Christianity in the United States ed. Mark A. Lamport (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS

Review of David Walker’s Railroading Religion: Mormonism, Tourists, and the Corporate Spirit of the West (forthcoming in American Religion 2020)

Review of Brett Grainger’s Church in the Wild: Evangelicals in Antebellum America Reading Religion (August 3, 2020).

Review of Katherine Lofton’s Consuming Religion, Reading Religion (December 13, 2017).

Review of Kathryn Gin Lum’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction, Reading Religion (August 4, 2016).

Review of David Morgan’s The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 25 (Spring 2013): 165-166.