Colleen McDannell

Colleen McDannell is Professor of History and Sterling M. McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.  Her most recent book, The Spirit of Vatican II: Catholic Reform in America (Basic Books 2011), examines the reception of the Second Vatican Council using her family as a narrative thread.  A specialist in visual and material culture, McDannell has published the edited volume, Catholics in the Movies (Oxford University Press, 2007); Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (Yale University Press 2004) and Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America, (Yale University Press, 1995). Heaven: A History co-authored with Bernhard Lang (Yale University Press, second edition, 2001) has been translated into multiple languages.  Her monograph, The Christian Home in Victorian America: 1840-1900 (Indiana University Press 1986), established material culture as a viable evidence base for analyzing American religious history.  Her research and teaching have been funded by a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Fulbright’s John Adams Chair in American History, and an Indo-American Fellowship.  She has edited a two-volume documents reader, The Religions of the United States in Practice (Princeton, 2001), and her journal articles range from interpretations of Victorian masculinity among Irish-American Catholics to Evangelical home schooling in contemporary America. 

 

 

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