Isaiah Ellis

Postdoctoral Fellow

Fields of Study

Areas of Interest

  • Infrastructure studies
  • Religion in the Americas
  • Space, place, and architecture
  • Religion and cities
  • Material religion
  • Race and empire in the U.S. South
  • United States history

Biography

Isaiah Ellis is an historian of American religion with expansive interests in how religious concepts are made material in unexpected places, particularly in social forms, built environments, economic landscapes, and the production of state space. His book manuscript in-progress, titled Apostles of Asphalt: Race, Empire, and the Moral Politics of Infrastructure in the American South, examines competing narrations of infrastructural and economic modernity in the U.S. South during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and asks how contemporary debates about American religious, racial, and moral life are articulated through the prism of infrastructure.

He is also working on new projects examining religion in industrial landscapes; tourism and religious corporate forms in the U.S. South; the American citrus industry; and the formative relationships between religious eclecticism, architecture, and urban planning in nineteenth-century American cities.