BIO
Professor Trollinger specializes in United States religious history, concentrating on race and gender in religious writing. Her research and teaching focus on African American religious history, gender and religion, religious autobiographies, religion and literature, and secularisms.
Professor Trollinger’s current manuscript, Acts of Obedience: Race and Gender in Rebecca Jackson’s Visionary Writing, asks how the religious visions of Black Shaker Rebecca Jackson conceptualize the raced and gendered body in the first half of the nineteenth century. Trollinger’s research has been published in Religion and American Culture and Arizona Quarterly. In her second book project, Trollinger compares how believers, psychologists, and novelists explain religious experiences. Focused on the turn of the twentieth century, this manuscript investigates how writers from disparate fields used descriptions of religious ecstasy to make arguments about race, history, and democracy in the United States.
“My work always returns to the question of how people explain religious experiences, and what is at stake in those explanations. I often ask how writers depict the religious body in worship, visions, and religious community. Time and again, explanations of religious experiences make arguments about social hierarchies, bodily control, and political power. Drawing on my training in English, my methodology involves close reading texts while also situating them in their historical contexts to understand how religious writers engage in conversations about and with the supernatural in order to speak to pressing worldly concerns.
Bio
Professor Trollinger specializes in United States religious history, concentrating on race and gender in religious writing. Her research and teaching focus on African American religious history, gender and religion, religious autobiographies, religion and literature, and secularisms.
Professor Trollinger’s current manuscript, Acts of Obedience: Race and Gender in Rebecca Jackson’s Visionary Writing, asks how the religious visions of Black Shaker Rebecca Jackson conceptualize the raced and gendered body in the first half of the nineteenth century. Trollinger’s research has been published in Religion and American Culture and Arizona Quarterly. In her second book project, Trollinger compares how believers, psychologists, and novelists explain religious experiences. Focused on the turn of the twentieth century, this manuscript investigates how writers from disparate fields used descriptions of religious ecstasy to make arguments about race, history, and democracy in the United States.
“My work always returns to the question of how people explain religious experiences, and what is at stake in those explanations. I often ask how writers depict the religious body in worship, visions, and religious community. Time and again, explanations of religious experiences make arguments about social hierarchies, bodily control, and political power. Drawing on my training in English, my methodology involves close reading texts while also situating them in their historical contexts to understand how religious writers engage in conversations about and with the supernatural in order to speak to pressing worldly concerns.