Participant Info

First Name
Shelby
Last Name
Balik
Country
United States
State
CO Colorado
Affiliation
Metropolitan State University of Denver
Website URL
http://www.shelbymbalik.com/
Keywords
early America, religion, family, New England, church and state, material culture, early republic, colonial era, education, history of the book, women and gender
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a professor of history at Metropolitan State University of Denver. I hold an A.B. in history and American civilization from Brown University, an M.A. in education from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before I began my graduate program at Wisconsin, I taught history at the high school level. After earning the Ph.D., I taught at Illinois State University, the University of Colorado Denver, and Iliff School of Theology. At MSU-Denver, I teach courses in early American history, American religious history, American slavery, and social studies teacher education.

I am the author of Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), which won the 2014 Best First Book Award from the Phi Alpha Theta history honor society. I have published articles in Church History, the Journal of Social History, the Massachusetts Historical Review, New England Quarterly, and the Journal of Church and State. My current book project is tentatively titled “Family Religion: The Politics of Practice in Early American Households,” and will offer a religious history of family life that places the household firmly at the center of early American religious culture.

Recent Publications

Scholarly work:

Rally the Scattered Believers: Northern New England’s Religious Geography. Religion in North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.

“Delivery and Deliverance: Religious Experiences of Childbirth in Eighteenth-Century America.” Church History 91 (March 2022): 62-82.

“In the Interest of True Religion: Disestablishment in Vermont.” Chapter in Religious Dissent and Disestablishment: Church-State Relations in the New American States, 1776-1833, eds. Carl H. Esbeck and Jonathan den Hartog. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2019.

“’Dear Christian Friends’: Charity Bryant, Sylvia Drake, and the Making of a Spiritual Network.” Journal of Social History 50 (Summer 2017): 630-54.

“‘Persecuted in the Bowels of a Free Republic’: Samuel Ely and the Agrarian Theology of Justice, 1768-1797.” Massachusetts Historical Review 15 (2013): 89-122.

“‘Scattered as Christians Are in This Part of Our Country’: Layfolk’s Reading, Writing, and Religious Community in New England’s Northern Frontier, 1780-1830.” New England Quarterly 83 (December 2010): 607-40.

“Equal Right and Equal Privilege: Separating Church and State in Vermont.” Journal of Church and State 50 (Winter 2008): 23-48.

Op-eds:

“The Supreme Court is Unraveling the Separation of Church and State.” Washington Post, July 12, 2022.

“Donald Trump’s Disregard for Our Transition Rituals Threatens Our Democracy.” Washington Post, November 12, 2020.

“Churchgoers, Stay Home – It’s the American Way.” Religion Dispatches, April 30, 2020.

Media Coverage
Ben Franklin's World (podcast), Chasing the Mind (podcast), feature stories on local radio (850 AM KOA), print news (La Voz and MSU Denver Red), and television news (9News, KUSA, NBC affiliate; Denver Channel 7, KMGH, ABC affiliate), and elsewhere
Country Focus
Colonial North America and early United States
Expertise by Geography
United States
Expertise by Chronology
17th century, 18th century, 19th century
Expertise by Topic
American Revolution, American Founding Era, Book History, Children & Youth, Family, Gender, Local & Regional, Material Culture, Politics, Religion, Sexuality, Slavery, Women