I teach art history at the University of West Georgia. I research the intersection of art and religion in American culture, focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth century West. I published Mormon Visual Culture in the American West with Routledge in 2021.
Another research interest is the visual culture of American hymnody. I’m curator of the Sacred Harp Museum in Carrollton, GA, home of an outstanding archival collection documenting the history and practice of shape note singing.
Selected Publications
with Cynthia Prescott and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, “This is the Place, Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria: Monuments to Settler Constructions of History, Race, and Religion,” Safundi, the Journal of South African and American Studies 22, 2021.
with Cynthia Prescott and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, “Enshrining Gender in Monuments to Settler Whiteness: South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and the United States’ This Is the Place Monument,” Humanities 10, no. 1 (2021): 41. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10010041
“The Sacred Harp ‘Minutes Book’: Centering Tradition for an Expanding Community in the Digital Age,” American Periodicals 30, no. 1, 2020. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751778
“C. C. A. Christensen, Joseph Preaching to the Indians, 1878 – an Object Narrative,” Conversations: An Online Journal for the Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, Summer, 2014. https://doi.org/10.22332/con.obj.2014.48
“Where ‘Deep Streams Flow, Endlessly Renewing’: Metaphysical Religion and ‘Cultural Evolution’ in the Art of Agnes Pelton,” American Religious Liberalism, ed. Sally M. Promey and Leigh Schmidt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). https://iupress.org/9780253002099/american-religious-liberalism/