Assistant Professor of History and American Studies

Contact

401-254-5380
BH 9
mhedstrom@rwu.edu
Web Page:  http://www.matthedstrom.com

Education

BA, History, Haverford College
MA, American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
PhD, American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

Postdoctoral Fellowships

2007-2008: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University
2005-2007:  Lilly Fellow and Lecturer in Humanities and American Studies,Valparaiso University

Scholarly Interests and Projects

My research and teaching interests range broadly in United States cultural history, American studies, race, and American religious history, all with a particular focus on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

My current book, Seeking a Spiritual Center: Books, Book Culture, and Liberal Religion in Modern America, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2009.  Seeking a Spiritual Center offers new interpretations of the influence of religious liberalism on American culture in the twentieth century, and of the place of consumer culture and print media in shaping spirituality.  In particular, the book traces the rise of religious middlebrow culture in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s through an examination of key texts, reader reception, transformations in publishing, and a variety of public reading programs.

The reading endeavors examined here—including, among others, the Religious Book Club, founded in 1927, and the book-week campaign of the National Conference of Christians and Jews during World War II—utilized modern marketing strategies, including newspaper, radio, and film promotion, and extensive cooperation with public libraries, schools, churches, and government, to advance a capacious spiritual idiom rooted in liberal mystical and psychological vocabularies.

By the 1940s, in large part due to the pressures of the Second World War, this religious middlebrow culture became a thriving interfaith cultural space, as readers increasingly ventured beyond the boundaries of established faith traditions.  In this way, mid-century consumer and media practices not only shaped private spirituality but also helped redefine public conceptions of pluralism and the relationship of religious liberalism to the public sphere.  The conclusion relates these developments to the religious and cultural transformations of the 1960s and 1970s.

I am beginning work on a second book-length project on race and the construction of religious authenticity in American culture.  Also in progress are shorter pieces on the religious agenda of public libraries in the interwar period, and an article on the importance of interfaith reading programs to mid-century liberalism.

Courses

• Introduction to American Studies/The American Experience
• United States History, 1607-1865/1877 (US Survey I)
  Religion in America (Survey)
• Visions of the Apocalypse in American Culture
• Religion and the Counterculture in America
• Religious Pluralism in the 20th-Century US
• Popular Religion in 20th-Century America
• War, Society, and Culture in the 20th-Century US