Background

Sonia Hazard (Ph.D. 2017, Duke University, Religion) focuses on religions in early national and antebellum US history; media, material texts, and the history of the book and printing; material, visual, and sensory culture; and theory and method, especially new materialisms.

My first book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press (2025). Focusing on the goliath publisher the American Tract Society, the book bridges methods from book history, STS, and new materialisms to provide a “media infrastructuralist” account of the expansion of evangelical power over the territory of the early American nation. The project has been supported by several fellowships, including the NEH Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society (2018-19), the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2016-17), and the Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School (2015-17).

Questions about media and its consequences in the context of US empire continue to inform my current book project, Christianity and the Book in the Cherokee Diaspora, 1821-1861, which parses how the material qualities, meanings, and uses of print in the Cherokee language changed over time and across the ruptures of removal. My first article from this body of work, “The Politics of Media Format: Printing Poor Sarah During the Removal Crisis in Cherokee Nation” (Church History, 2022) won the Bowers Award for best article in textual scholarship and the Religious Communication Association's article of the year award. The book project has been supported by the National Humanities Center (2024-25), the NEH Summer Stipend (2022), and several archives. For effective Cherokee language training, I highly recommend J. W. Webster’s Think Cherokee.   

An ongoing interest is in the agency of nonhumans. My FSU Religion colleague Elizabeth Cecil and I are collaborating on More-than-human Religion, a project dedicated to exploring nonhuman forces, entities, and ecologies from the perspective of the interdisciplinary study of religion. In my own research, I’ve been especially interested in forms of vital materiality in the Mormon tradition, notably in my award-winning article, “How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism” (Religion & American Culture, 2021).

At FSU, I contribute to the Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) center and the History of Text Technologies (HoTT) program. I am also active as a senior fellow of the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) and on the Board of Trustees for the Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT).

Several of my publications are available on my academia.edu page.

Publications 

• "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, "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).

Courses

FALL 2023

• HUM2937: Seminar: Christianity, Art & Materiality (Honors)
• RLG5035: Seminar: Introduction to the Study of Religion

SPRING 2024

• REL2121: Religion in the United States
• REL4491/RLG5195: Early Republic/Antebellum U.S.