Professor of Instruction
Email: j_p532@txstate.edu
Educational Background
Ph.D. - UCLA
M.A. - San Francisco State University
B.A. - University of Oregon
My research focuses on race, ethnicity, and religion in nineteenth-century America, especially in the North American West. My book American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California was published by the University of California Press in 2012. The book examines contestations over the place of Native Americans and Chinese Americans from the Civil War to the 1890s, demonstrating the centrality of religion in racial formation and the importance of the West in the story of Reconstruction. My second book, Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal, and California's First Cult Scare, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. It explores an international 1890s sex scandal that surrounded the Brotherhood of the New Life, a multi-racial spiritualist community in northern California that became the prototype for the "cult" in the popular imagination. In 2010 I was selected as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Postdoctoral Fellow. From 2010-2012 I was a Young Scholar of American Religion Fellow at IUPUI鈥檚 Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. I have thrice been selected as a participant in symposiums sponsored by the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University: "Civil War Wests" (2013-2014), "Religion in the North American West" (2022-2023), and "After the War: Rebuilding the Republic in North America, 1865-1876" (2026-2027). I am currently researching stigmata controversies in the nineteenth-century United States.
Select Publications
鈥淭he Birth of the Cult Leader: Thomas Lake Harris, New Religions, and the American West,鈥� in Brandi Denison and Brett Hendrickson, eds., Crisis of Care: Religion and Empire in the American West Since 1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2026)
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2025)
鈥淭he Mystery of Everything Out There: Bigfoot and Religion in the Twenty-First Century,鈥� in Darryl Caterine and John W. Morehead, eds., The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape, 78-91 (New York: Routledge, 2019)
鈥淪tudying Gods and Monsters,鈥� in Adam Golub and Heather Richardson Hayton, eds., , 161-73 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2017)
鈥淩ace, Religion, and Naturalization: How the West Shaped Citizenship Debates in the Reconstruction Congress,鈥� in Adam Arenson and Andrew Graybill, eds., , 181-201 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015)
鈥淣ew Directions in the History of Religion and Race,鈥� American Quarterly 68 (2016): 1007-17
鈥淒isorderly Doctrines: Religion, Race, and the Fountaingrove Sex Scandal of 1891-1892,鈥� Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14 (October 2015): 475-502
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012)
鈥溾�榃oman Is Everywhere the Purifier鈥�: The Politics of Temperance, 1878-1900,鈥� in Robert W. Cherny, Mary Ann Irwin, and Ann Marie Wilson, eds., , 59-76 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011)
鈥淎nti-Catholicism and Race in Post-Civil-War San Francisco,鈥� Pacific Historical Review 78 (Fall 2009): 505-44
Courses Taught
History 1310 | U.S. History to 1877
History 1320 | U.S. History, 1877-Date
History 2311 | History of World Civilizations to 1500
History 2312 | History of World Civilizations, 1500-Date
History 3346 | Era of the Civil War and Reconstruction
History 3352 | American West
History 3374 | U.S. Religious History
HON 3399 | Comics, Cartoons, and Contested Racial Identities in U.S. History
History 5345M | History of Utopian Communities