I am from New York originally and come from a family of educators and public servants. My training is in the U.S. intellectual history and I have a particular interest in public debates about questions of morality and the limits of civic culture. From 2000 to 2013, I was a full-time, tenured faculty member at Marian University where I directed the Honors Program and served as chair of the Department of History and Social Science for five years. I came to Indiana because of Marian University and have stayed because of IUPUI.
20th Century U.S. history, U.S. intellectual history,American Studies, movies and American culture, American cultural history, American religious history
Evangelization to the Heart: Brief History of American Franciscans and Media (Catholic University Press, 2018) with Andrew Hartman, No Things but in Ideas: United States Intellectual History (Cornell University Press, 2018) with Philip Goff and Rhys Williams, Beyond Bellah: Essays on Civil Religion in America (Oxford University Press 2018) God and War: American Civil Religion since 1945 (Rutgers University Press, 2012) The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court (University Press of Kansas, 2008) Freedom to Offend: How New York Remade Movie Culture (University Press of Kentucky, 2007) It’s Only a Movie: Films and Critics in American Culture (University Press of Kentucky, 2001)
Fellow, Cluster of Excellence, University of Muenster, Germany, June 2014 Hundere Lecture in Religion, Oregon State University Fulbright Danish Distinguished Chair in American Studies, Copenhagen Business School, 2008-2009
U.S. Intellectual History, American Studies, American cultural history, American religious history, history of movie culture, transnational intellectual history, civil religion, American Catholic history, just war theory
