David Walker

David Walker (Leadership Team, Project Cycle II) is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Yale University. His work focuses on intersections of religion, industry, and tourist economies in the nineteenth-century American West. Ongoing research projects concern theories of time and security formed through Gilded Age bureaucracies, wildcat banking, P. T. Barnum’s circuses, and Harry Houdini’s magic shows. Recent publications treat ritual innovations in spiritualism and stage magic; and railroad companies’ influence on popular understandings of Mormonism.