Nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. religion, the politics of religious freedom, religion in the U.S. West, racial and religious encounters, and the cultural history of the study of religion.

Tisa Wenger (Ph.D., Princeton University) is Assistant Professor of American Religions. Before she came to ASU, she was Acting Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, and held a Bill and Rita Clements Fellowship at Southern Methodist University's Clements Center for Southwest Studies.

Her book We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom shows how dominant cultural conceptions of religion and religious freedom affected the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico as they sought to protect their religious ceremonies from government suppression, and how that struggle transformed the politics of Indian affairs and helped reshape mainstream views of religion.

Dr. Wenger's second book, tentatively titled The Ironies of Religious Liberty in America, 1850-1950, will look beyond well-known court decisions on the First Amendment to examine the limitations and consequences of religious liberty as a foundational American ideal. While constitutional guarantees of religious freedom have provided valuable protection to many religious minorities, these provisions and their interpretive history impose certain assumptions that inevitably reshape the traditions they protect. Protestant elites have often celebrated religious liberty as proof of the superiority of the Anglo-American Protestant culture that originated this ideal, using this account to discredit other religions which they deemed inimical to it both at home and around the world. As with We Have a Religion, this project will seek to understand how culturally specific formations of religion and religious freedom shape the dynamics of religious encounter in America.

REL 320 - Religion in America
REL 405 - Religion, Politics, and Protest in the U.S.
REL 405 - Religion in the American West
REL 405 - Race and Religion in the Americas
REL 591/691 - Defining Religion in American Public Life
REL 591/691 - Missions and Missionaries in the Americas

REL 691 - The Study of Religion in North America

We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

“The Practice of Dance for the Future of Christianity: ‘Eurythmic Worship’ in New York’s Roaring Twenties,” in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, edited by Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 222-249.

“Modernists, Pueblo Indians, and the Politics of Primitivism,” in Race, Religion, Region: Landscapes of Encounter in the American West, edited by Fay Botham and Sara Patterson (University of Arizona Press, 2006), 101-114.

“‘We Are Guaranteed Freedom’: Pueblo Indians and the Category of Religion in the 1920s.” History of Religions 45:2 (November 2005), 89-113

“Land, Culture, and Sovereignty in the Pueblo Dance Controversy.” Journal of the Southwest 16:2 (Fall 2004), 381-412.

“Female Christ and Feminist Foremother: The Many Lives of Ann Lee.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 18:2 (Fall 2002), 5-32.