Biography
Before coming to Haverford, Lindsay Reckson was a Presidential Excellence Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in English from Princeton University in 2011, and her B.A. in English and Creative Writing from New York University in 2004.
Research
Lindsay Reckson teaches and writes at the intersection of American and African-American literary studies, performance studies, media studies, and religion. Her first book, Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature, was published in January 2020 from NYU Press. A study of the affective life of Jim Crow secularism, Realist Ecstasy demonstrates how the realist imagining of possessed bodies helped construct and naturalize racial difference while excavating the complex, shifting, and dynamic possibilities embedded in ecstatic performance. She is the editor of American Literature in Transition: 1876-1910, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Her current book project, Notes on Gesture, is a series of essays exploring how minimal or routine gestures become sites of ethical inquiry in times of attenuated political possibility. Her essays have appeared in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, American Religious Liberalism (ed. Schmidt and Promey), the Los Angeles Review of Books, Avidly, Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, The Pocket Instructor: Literature, and Keywords for American Cultural Studies. She received a 2016-2017 ACLS Fellowship for Realist Ecstasy, and was the winner of the 2020 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching.