Tisa Wenger

Tisa Wenger (Ph.D., Princeton University, 2002) is a historian of American religion with research and teaching interests in the discursive politics of religious freedom, religion in the American West, Native American religious history, and formations of race, religion, and the secular in U.S. history. Before coming to Yale, Dr. Wenger taught for five years at Arizona State University, and held a research fellowship at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. 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 concepts of religion and religious freedom to defend ceremonial traditions against government suppression, finding their traditions reshaped in the process. Her current project, Race, Empire, and American Religious Freedom, argues that U.S. discourses of religious freedom have significantly intersected with the politics of race and empire.