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; printing and other text technologies; material, visual, and sensory culture; and theory and method, especially new materialisms.

Her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Building Evangelical America: How the American Tract Society Laid the Groundwork for a Religious Revolution, is under contract with Oxford University Press. It traces how evangelicals built a "media infrastructure" to win conversions across the expanding territory of the early American nation. This 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).

Hazard contributes to FSU’s History of Text Technologies (HoTT) program. She is currently a senior fellow of the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography (SoFCB) and serves on the Board of Trustees for the Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT).

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

Publications 

• "The Politics of Media Format: Printing Poor Sarah During the Removal Crisis in Cherokee Nation," Church History 91:4 (forthcoming December 2022).
• “How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism,” Religion and American Culture 31:2 (2021), 137-192.
  • Winner of 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 2023

• REL2121: Religion in the United States
• REL4044: What Is Religion? What Is Religious Studies?