A Conversation: Abram Van Engen & Tracy Fessenden
Religion and Politics After January 6
Join Tracy Fessenden and Abram Van Engen in a public conversation that puts Culture and Redemption and City on a Hill in dialogue, reflecting on how the thesis of each has fared in light of the January 6 insurrection. Fessenden’s book explores American secularity and public spheres; Van Engen’s book offers a history of American exceptionalism. Both books consider the long legacies of puritanism in America, and both scholars will discuss together the puritans as template, generative or otherwise, for writing about religion and literature in America.
Tracy Fessenden is the Steve and Margaret Forster Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies and Director of Strategic Initiatives in the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. She holds degrees in religious studies from the University of Virginia and in English from Yale. Her work focuses on religion and American literature and the arts; gender, race, and sexuality in American religious history; and the relationship between religion and the secular in American law, culture, and public life. She is the author of Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State UP, 2018) and Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton UP, 2007; 2013); co-editor of Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference (Columbia UP, 2013) and The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature (Routledge, 2001); co-editor of the North American Religions series at New York University Press, the Religion Around series at Penn State University Press, and the journal Religion and American Culture for Cambridge University Press. Her articles and essays have appeared in journals including American Literary History, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Religion & Politics, Early American Literature, New Literary History, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Church History, Religion and Literature, the Journal of Women's History, Religion, U.S. Catholic Historian, Signs, and in many edited collections and anthologies. Professor Fessenden has been a principal or co-principal investigator on numerous research projects, including Recovering Truth: Religion, Journalism, and Democracy in a Post-Truth Era and Religion and International Affairs: Through the Prism of Rights and Gender, both supported by the Luce Foundation; Apocalyptic Narratives and Climate Change: Religion, Journalism, and the Challenge of Public Engagement, supported by Luce and the American Council of Learned Societies; and Public Religion, the Secular, and Democracy and Difficult Dialogues: Teaching and Talking about Religion in Public, both supported by the Ford Foundation.
Abram Van Engen began his career with a study of sympathy in seventeenth-century Puritanism, drawing together abiding interests in the history of emotions, theology, imagined communities, and literary form. Those interests led to his first book, Sympathetic Puritans, and numerous related articles on early American religion and literature.
Beginning with these concerns, Van Engen has moved from a study of the Puritans in their own place and context to an interest in the way Puritans have been recollected and re-used by later generations. Studying the life of texts and the effects of collective memory, Van Engen has produced a second book, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, along with several other publications that together study the creation and curation of American exceptionalism.
Work on his second project was furthered by participation in the Humanities Digital Workshop at Washington University in St. Louis, where Van Engen has been leading a team to study the concept and creation of American exceptionalism through a history of the phrase “city on a hill.” That work has led to multiple related digital projects, all in teams with undergraduate and graduate researchers. Collaboration remains essential to his work, with co-edited journal issues, co-written articles, co-taught courses and working groups that bring together literature, history, religion, politics, and psychology.