Kathryn Lofton
Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies
A.B., University of Chicago
M.A, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Kathryn Lofton is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies. She taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and Indiana University, Bloomington, before arriving at Yale in 2009 after a yearlong fellowship with the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. As a scholar of religion and American culture, her research investigates the inseparability of religion and its cultural constructions and, likewise, the extent to which culture itself is embedded in religious histories. She has published on a variety of subjects addressing documentary materials from the last two centuries of American history, including evangelicalism, modernism, African American religion, popular culture, and consumer rites. Her first book, Oprah:
The Gospel of an Icon, is forthcoming from the University of California Press. She is currently working on her second monograph, The Modernity in Mr. Shaw: Modernisms and Fundamentalisms in American Culture, which examines the formation of sexual identity through the life of one Presbyterian fundamentalist, John Balcom Shaw (1860-1935), an editor of The Fundamentals who was remitted from the ministry following accusations of sodomy in 1918. This research draws upon the historiography of American religion to consider broader questions in the history of religion. How does the scholar name the religious? How do scholars and students determine the history and meanings of religions within the political and social histories of the United States? How do we understand these histories in the light of concepts of the secular, the modern West, or modernity? What are the relationships between consumer activity and religious identity or between sexual and religious practices? At Yale, Professor Lofton teaches courses that seek to answer these questions of history simultaneously with those of classification, comparison, and cultural studies.
