Leigh Eric Schmidt is Edward Mallinckrodt University Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.  There he is involved with the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, Religious Studies, History, American Cultural Studies, and the Humanities Center. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard University, and, from 1995 to 2009, he taught at Princeton University where he was the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and chair of the Department of Religion. He has held research fellowships at Stanford and Princeton and also through the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. He is the author of numerous books, including Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2000), which won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in Historical Studies and the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association. He is also the author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (HarperOne, 2005; University of California Press, 2012); Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton University Press, 1995); and Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, 1989), which received the Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. In addition, he served as co-editor with Laurie Maffly-Kipp and Mark Valeri of Practicing Protestants: Histories of the Christian Life in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) and co-author with Edwin Scott Gaustad of The Religious History of America (HarperOne, 2002). His latest book is Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic Books, 2010). He is currently co-editing with Sally Promey an essay collection on the history of American religious liberalism for Indiana University Press (due out in 2012) and has another project in the beginning stages with Princeton University Press tentatively entitled "Studying Religion: An American History."