Dana Logan received her Ph.D. in Religious Studies from IU in 2015 and is currently an assistant professor at UNC Greensboro. Dr. Logan is a scholar of American religion and ritual who works on the history of evangelicalism, civil society in the nineteenth-century United States, and the experience of ritual in everyday life. Her book, Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America, argues that political ritual can be boring, sacred authority can be drab, and earnest ritual can be awkward. Ritual as a category, Logan shows, does not always create a synthesis between bodily feeling and ideological commitments.

 

Awkward Rituals theorizes an under-examined form of action: rituals that do not feel natural even if they sometimes feel good. This account challenges common notions of ritual as a force that binds society and synthesizes the self. Ranging from Freemason initiations to evangelical societies to missionaries posing as sailors, Logan shows how white Protestants promoted a class-based society while simultaneously trumpeting egalitarianism. She thus redescribes ritual as a box to check, a chore to complete, an embarrassing display of theatrical verve. In Awkward Rituals, Logan emphasizes how ritual distinctively captures what does not change through revolution.

Most recently she has been researching Baptist discipline in the antebellum South. She is interested in the relationship between spiritual discipline and policing in American history. All of her work theorizes the blurred lines between governance, work, consumerism, and ritual. She teaches classes on the history of American religion, evangelicalism, “cults,” race and religion, and the role of religion in celebrity culture. She loves Shakers, narratives where children are raised in the wild, and coywolves.