Participant Info

First Name
Emily Suzanne
Last Name
Clark
Country
United States
State
WA Washington
Affiliation
Gonzaga University
Website URL
https://emilysuzanneclark.wordpress.com
Keywords
American religious history, African American religious history, 19th-century American history, southern history, history of Spiritualism, the occult in America
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Gonzaga University, where I teach classes on American religions. My main scholarly and teaching interests center on religion and race in the Americas.

I am the author of the award-winning book, A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans. Focusing on the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, the book argues that Afro-Creole Spiritualism provided a forum for criticizing the material world’s injustices and for formulating a corrective based on egalitarian republicanism.

I’m currently in the research-in-progress stage of a new monograph. It’s tentatively titled Spiritual Matters: American Spiritualism and Material Culture and is under advance contract with the University of North Carolina Press. It’ll focus on Spiritualists and their “stuff.”

Recent Publications

Books

Edited with Brad Stoddard, Race and New Religious Movements in the USA: A Documentary Reader (Bloomsbury, 2019).

A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans (University of North Carolina Press; 2016 hardback, 2018 paperback).

Articles and Chapters

“Jesuits, the Iñupiat, and Catholicism on the Seward Peninsula Coast, 1898–1937,” American Catholic Studies, 130.3 (2019), 37–66.

“‘To Battle for Human Rights’: Afro-Creole Spiritualism and Martyrdom,” Journal of Africana Religions, 6.2 (2018), 161–189.

“African American Religions in the 19th Century,” Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, Paul Harvey and Kathryn Gin Lum, eds., (Oxford University Press, 2018), 403–419.

“Religion and Race,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, Jon Butler, ed., published online February 2017.

“Alternative Religious Movements and Race,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion in America, John Corrigan, ed., also forthcoming in print (Oxford University Press, 2018).

“New World, New Jerusalem, New Orleans: The Apocalyptic Art of Sister Gertrude Morgan,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, 55.4 (2014): 432–459.

“Noble Drew Ali’s ‘Clean and Pure Nation’: The Moorish Science Temple, Identity, and Healing,” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 16.3 (2013): 31–51.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
USA
Expertise by Geography
North America
Expertise by Chronology
19th century, 20th century
Expertise by Topic
Colonialism, Gender, Indigenous Peoples, Material Culture, Pedagogy, Race, Religion, Slavery