Sonia Hazard is a Ph.D. candidate in Religion at Duke University. Her areas of specialization include religion and media; visual, material, and sensory culture; material texts and book history; antebellum evangelicalism; and theory and method, especially new materialism and posthumanism.
Hazard’s dissertation, “The Touch of the Word: Evangelical Cultures of Print in Antebellum America,” is a reception history of evangelical popular print media. It reconstructs the material environments, practices, and affects that defined the everyday encounter with proliferating religious tracts and books. Her research has been supported by several fellowships, including the Mellon Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (2014-15), the Greenfield Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia (2015-16), and the Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School (2015-17). Her writing appears in Religion and Society and Church History.
Hazard earned her B.A. in religious studies and art history from Macalester College. She holds a master’s degree in the history of Christianity from Harvard Divinity School.