Sally M. Promey
Professor of religion and visual culture; professor of American studies; and deputy director of the Institute of Sacred Music.
Prof. Promey comes to Yale from the University of Maryland, where she was professor and chair in the department of art history and archaeology. Her scholarship explores relations among visual culture and religions in the United States from the colonial period through the present. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book titled Religion in Plain View, a history of the public display of religion in the United States. Her monograph Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (Princeton, 1999) received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion. An earlier book, Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Indiana, 1993) was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art. Among recent articles and book chapters are essays titled “Seeing the Self ‘in Frame’”: Early New England Material Practice and Puritan Piety”; “Taste Cultures and the Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940-1965”; “Situating Visual Culture”; and “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art.” Prof. Promey is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including two Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowships (2003 and 1993) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, a residential fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2000), and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers (1997). In 2001 she was recipient of the Regents’ Faculty Award for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity from the Board of Regents for the University System of Maryland; in 2002 she received the Kirwan Faculty Research and Scholarship Prize of the University of Maryland. She was co-director (with David Morgan, Valparaiso University) of a multi-year interdisciplinary collaborative project, "The Visual Culture of American Religions," funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Lilly Endowment Inc. A book of the same title, co-edited by Promey and Morgan, appeared in 2001 from University of California Press. In 2004 she was Senior Historian in Residence for the Terra Summer Residency Program in Giverny, France. She serves on the editorial boards of American Art, Winterthur Portfolio, and Material Religion. B.A., Hiram College; M.Div., Yale University; Ph.D., University of Chicago.