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I’m currently working on three main projects.
- I’m co-editing an anthology of writings by James W.C. Pennington, a famous Black abolitionist, intellectual, and Reformed churchman. I’m also editing a companion volume of essays about Pennington’s life and contexts. Both books are forthcoming in 2024, from Oxford University Press.
- I’m editing my dissertation for publication. This project looks at how American Christians composed, revised, and published their spiritual autobiographies, during a period of intense concern about religious decline and secret unbelief.
- During my postdoctoral studies at Heidelberg University, I studied representations of the Holy Land in Cotton Mather’s unpublished—but mammoth—Biblia Americana. Had it been published, the Biblia Americana would have
been America’s first Bible commentary. I’m fascinated by how Mather and other eighteenth-century apologeticists presented information about the Holy Land as biblical interpretative aids. I’m even more interested in parabiblical
reference aids embraced fiction alongside popular scholarship throughout the 19th century. What kind of imaginative work did the Holy Land perform for distant Americans? Who read this literature, and why? What cultural, artistic, and theological legacies did it leave?