Tisa Wenger

Tisa Wenger (Ph.D., Princeton University, 2002) is a historian of American religion with research and teaching interests in the cultural politics of religious freedom and the intersections of race, religion, and empire in U.S. history. Her first book We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) shows how the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico deployed the concepts of religion and religious freedom to defend their ceremonial practices against government suppression and found them reshaped in the process. Her most recent book, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) explores the significance of religious freedom for a variety of colonized and minority peoples, arguing that this ideal worked historically to structure but also to unsettle the racial-religious assemblages of empire. Before coming to Yale, Dr. Wenger taught for five years at Arizona State University and held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.