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 book, Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America, 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,

Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA (2009)

MTS, History of Christianity

Reed College, Portland, OR (2007)

BA, Religious Studies

EMPLOYMENT

Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (2020-)

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Religious Studies, Connecticut College (2018-2020)

Postdoctoral Fellow, John C. Danforth Center on Religion & Politics, Washington University in St. Louis (2016-2018)

Merton Teaching Fellow, Department of Religious Studies, Mercyhurst University (2015-2016)

PUBLICATIONS IN PROCESS

Policing the South: Baptist Church Discipline in the Antebellum South (book manuscript)

“Itty Baby: Shaker Kinship in the Era of Manifestations” for the edited volume Reconsidering the Shaker Era of Manifestations, editors Douglas Winiarski and Joshua Guthman

“It Was Never About the Snakes: Synanon and the Devil in Religious Studies”

PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS

Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).

“Ritual Chores: Catharine Beecher’s Domesticity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89, no. 3 (September 2021): 1074-1099.

“Shaker Dance and the Religious Production of Spectacle,” Religion Compass 15, no. 9 (September 2021).

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

“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).

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

“Lydia Maria Child and the Urbanity of Religious Cosmopolitanism in Antebellum New York City,” The Journal of Urban History 47 no.3 (2021): 568-583. First published online 2015.

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.