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Tracy Fessenden

Tracy Fessenden holds the Steve and Margaret Forster Professorship in Comparative Mythology at Arizona State University, where she is Professor of Religious Studies and interim Director of the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies. She is a scholar of American religion and secularism whose research focuses broadly on literature and the arts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  She is the author of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton UP, 2007) which traces the workings of a Protestant-secular continuum in American politics and letters from the Puritans to the present. Her most recent book, Religion Around Billie Holiday (Penn State UP, 2018) focuses on the singer and the religious and musical migrations that shaped her art, persona, and reception. She plans next to write a book about photography, death, and discourses of the spirit in nineteenth-century America. Fessenden is co-editor of The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality,and American Literature (Routledge, 2001), Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference (Columbia UP, 2013), an Editor of Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, and a General Editor of the North American Religions series at New York University Press.

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