Sonia Hazard
Assistant Professor of Religion
About
An assistant professor of religion at FSU, Sonia Hazard focuses on religions in early national and antebellum U.S. history, and media, material texts and new materialisms. Her first book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, is published with Oxford University Press (2025). Questions about media and its consequences in the context of U.S. empire continue to inform her current projects about Cherokee printing and American missionary collecting, supported by a fellowship at the National Humanities Center. Hazard co-directs More-than-human Religion. Several of her publications are available on her academia.edu page.
American Religious History
Publications
- “Paper,” Material Religion 21:4–5 (2025): 508–514.
- “Three Ways of Reading Missionary Marginalia” in American Contact: Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History, ed. Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 274–281.
- "The Politics of Media Format: Printing Poor Sarah During the Removal Crisis in Cherokee Nation," Church History 91:4 (2022): 824–863.
- Winner of the Fredson Bowers Memorial Award for the most outstanding essay in textual scholarship, Society for Textual Scholarship
- Winner of the Article of the Year Award, for the most outstanding article in religious communication, Religious Communication Association
- “How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism,” Religion and American Culture 31:2 (2021): 137–192.
- Winner of the Pollock Award for best historical article in Mormon studies, John Whitmer Historical Association
- “Evangelical Encounters: The American Tract Society and the Rituals of Print Distribution in Antebellum America,” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88:1 (2020): 200–234.
- “The American Tract Society and the Refinement of the Evangelical Book, 1825-1861,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 114:2 (2020): 127–194.
- “Two Ways of Thinking about New Materialism,” Material Religion 15:5 (2019): 629–31.
- “Thing,” Early American Studies 16:4 (2018): 792–800.
- “The Material Turn in the Study of Religion,” Religion and Society 4 (2013): 58–78.
Special issues
- Guest editor (with Elizabeth Cecil), "Material Texts: Religion, Mobility, and Responsibility," special issue of Textual Cultures 17:2 (2024).
- Guest editor, "Religion and Material Texts in the Americas," special issue of Material Religion 17:2 (2021).
- Guest editor (with Marcy J. Dinius), “Keywords for Early American Literature and Material Texts,” special issue of Early American Studies 16:4 (2018).
Faculty
