R E S E A R C H P R O J E C T S :

Haunted Modernity: Specters and Leviathans in Antebellum America
Haunted Modernity explores how such phenomena as the harnessing of steam power and the mechanization of factory floors, the spread of rail lines and telegraph wires, the extension of trade and postal routes, the accelerated production and dissemination of verbal and visual information, not to mention nascent strategies of advertising, rather than erode or even displace the public character of religion, amplified the power of religion in antebellum America. This amplification corresponded to a heightened sensitivity to the porous boundary between self and world. Although this boundary was never absolute its perceived deterioration was nothing less than a rupture in the idiom of experience at mid-century. And it is this rupture—how it happened, what preceded it, how it felt, and what it produced—that must be accounted for in order to begin to understand the religious history of what antebellum Americans referred to as the phenomenon of “systematic organization” and what contemporary scholars have labeled “network society.”
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Melvillean Frequencies:
Herman Melville, as I implicitly argue in Haunted Modernity, developed a style of cultural criticism that was not dependant upon the category of an autonomous, masterly, and possessive subject. In April of 1851, for example, Melville wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne in the midst of frantically revising Moby-Dick for publication that October. “It is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam.” Melvillean Frequencies will demonstrate how Melville’s interrogation of agency as it was manifested in the mid-century discourses of Evangelicalism, Common Sense philosophy, and liberalism has since produced a “network” of readings that dramatize the limitations and, more importantly, the possibilities of the critical imagination within the confines of twentieth-century modernity. Given the “translations” by Bess Meredyth, Lewis Mumford, Rockwell Kent, F.O. Matthiessen, Richard Wright, Orson Welles, Ralph Ellison, Charles Olson, C.L.R. James, Bob Dylan, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Altizer, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Laurie Anderson, Moby-Dick has become a kind of “sacred” text in which and through which religious history has been generated. Such a possibility was entertained by Melville, himself, in May of 1851. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” he confided to Hawthorne, “I should die in the gutter.”
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Summer Research 2004:
In the Summer of 2004 I conducted research at the Pitt Rivers Museum Research Centre and the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. My research was in response to the fact that scholars of religion have recently begun to look at themselves in the mirror in order to come to terms with their own vocabularies of analysis. The conversation about the cultural history of the study of religion is now in full swing as evidenced by the recent publication of articles, books, and conferences dedicated to sustained reflection on the "making" of the discipline.. Although the formation of the category of "religion" is the most obvious place to start this revisionist project, there remain a host of subsidiary categories—fetishism, mysticism, and survivals to name only a few—that are ripe for thick historicization. I am currently excavating one of the most haunted epistemological sites in the field of Religious studies—the category of culture. I am particularly interested in how the materials of American and English religious history offer new perspectives upon the formation of the culture  concept in the nineteenth century.
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