Tisa Wenger | |
---|---|
Born | 1969 (age 55–56) |
Occupation | Historian |
Spouse | Rod Groff |
Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | Savage debauchery or sacred communion? Religion and the primitive in the Pueblo dance controversy (2002) |
Doctoral advisor | Leigh E. Schmidt |
Academic work | |
Discipline | History |
Sub-discipline | History of religion in the United States |
Institutions |
Tisa Joy Wenger (born 1969) is an American historian centered on religion in the United States. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow,she is the author of We Have a Religion (2009) and Religious Freedom:The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017) and co-editor of Religion and U.S. Empire:Critical New Histories (2022). She has worked as a professor at Arizona State University and Yale Divinity School.
Tisa Joy Wenger [1] was born in 1969 [2] to Christine and Harold Wenger, [3] Mennonite missionaries who operated throughout Africa. [4] She got her BA (1991) in English at Eastern Mennonite University, [5] where she also made national headlines for introducing Virginia state legislator J. Samuel Glasscock at the college's Amnesty International-funded anti-death penalty forum. [6] As a graduate student,she obtained her MA (1997) in Women's Studies in Religion at Claremont Graduate University,before going to Princeton University Graduate School to get a second MA (1999) and her PhD (2002) in Religion; [5] her doctoral dissertation Savage debauchery or sacred communion? Religion and the primitive in the Pueblo dance controversy was advised by Leigh E. Schmidt. [7]
Wenger originally worked as a 2002–2003 Bill and Rita Clements Research Fellow at Southern Methodist University's William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies [8] and as acting associate director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion (2003–2004). [5] In 2004,she became assistant professor at the Arizona State University Department of Religious Studies. [5] She moved to Yale Divinity School in 2009 and was promoted to associate professor in 2014 and full professor in 2022. [5]
Wenger's academic research is centered on the history of religion in the United States. [9] She is the author of We Have a Religion (2009) and Religious Freedom:The Contested History of an American Ideal (2017), [10] [11] as well as co-editor of the volume Religion and U.S. Empire:Critical New Histories (2022). [12] She and Laura R. Olson are the editors of University Press of Kansas' series Studies in US Religion,Politics,and Law, [13] and she was the guest editor of an issue of Pacific Historical Review ,"Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West". [14] In 2021,she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Religion. [15]
Wenger has three children with her husband Rod Groff. [16] Originally baptized into her parents' faith as a teenager,she and her family had switched to Unitarian Universalism by 2019. [4]