Symposium Programme, Thur 26 March

On Thursday 26 March the Northumbria University US History Group and the Newcastle University Americas Research Group will be co-hosting a symposium on American Religious History.  Among other things, speakers will be focusing on the growing subfield, describing how their work fits in, and looking at what they see as trends in research and writing.  Sponsors include Harvard University Press, the US Embassy London, Northumbria University, and Newcastle University.  The symposium is open to the public and free of charge.  

American Religious History Symposium, 26 March 2015

3:30-5:00pm: Roundtable, Newcastle University, Armstrong Building, Room 2.50

Chair: Ben Houston (Newcastle University)

Sandra Scanlon (University College Dublin), “Determining Cause and Effect: Religion in the Study of US Foreign Relations”

Paul Harvey (Univ of Colorado, Colorado Springs), ”Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History,"

Randall Stephens (Northumbria University), “Modernist Fundamentalists, Mainliners, and Other Recent Trends in the Study of American Religious History”

Uta Balbier (King’s College London), “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden”: On the Transnational Dimensions of US Religious History”

5:15-6:15: Keynote, Armstrong Building, Room 2.50
 
Matthew Avery Sutton (Heidelberg University and Washington State University), “American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism”

6:15: Wine and Cheese Reception (sponsored by Harvard University Press)

Biographies of Participants

Sandra Scanlon is a lecturer in American history at University College Dublin. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Pro-War Movement: Domestic Support for the Vietnam War and the Making of Modern American Conservatism (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). Sandra was a Fulbright Scholar at Emory University during 2013 and is currently working on a study of grassroots engagement with foreign policy debates during the 1970s and 1980s.

Paul Harvey received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1992, and since 1996 has taught history at the University of Colorado, where he is currently Professor of History and Presidential Teaching Scholar. He is the author/editor of eight books, including most recently The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America, co-authored with Edward J. Blum (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and Moses Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South (University of Georgia Press Press, 2012).

Uta Balbier is the director of the Institute of North American Studies at King’s College London and a lecturer in US history. Her research focuses on transnational US religious history. She has published several articles on the dynamic interplay between German, British, and US evangelicalism in the 1950s and 60s and the broader transformations taking place in the religious culture of the US and Europe in the context of the Cold War and the rise of consumerism. She is in the process of completing the first draft of her monograph entitled “Billy Graham’s Cold War Crusades: Mass-evangelism, Consumerism, and the Free World.”

Matthew Avery Sutton is the Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University. He is currently working on a new book tentatively entitled FDR’s Army of Faith: Religion and Espionage in World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2019). He is the author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), Jerry Falwell and the Rise of the Religious Right: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012), and Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007). He has published articles in diverse venues ranging from the Journal of American History to the New York Times and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the US Fulbright Commission, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation.

Ben Houston is Senior Lecturer in History at Newcastle University.  He is the author of The Nashville Way: A Southern City and Racial Change (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Ben’s current research focuses on the civil rights movement in Tennessee and the African American experience in Pittsburgh. His article, ”The Aquinas of the Rednecks": Reconciliation, the Southern Character, and the Bootleg Ministry of Will D. Campbell,” appeared in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, 2011.

Randall Stephens is a Reader in History and American Studies at Northumbria University. He is the author of The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Harvard University Press, 2008) and The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, co-authored with Karl Giberson (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). His current project, under contract with Harvard University Press, looks at the intersection of rock music and religion since the 1950s.  In spring 2012 he was a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies in Norway.  He has written for the New York Times, the Christian Century, the Atlantic blog, and a variety of other publications.