BIO
Professor Baysa is a scholar of religion in America and historian of Christianity, with particular interest in the history of media technological infrastructures to facilitate religious expression, dialogue, and debate. Professor Baysa’s current book manuscript, Sacred Voices, Printed Silences: The Struggle Against Protestant Dominance in Early American Publishing, is under contract with NYU Press as part of their North American Religions Series and scheduled for publication Spring 2027. It addresses a wide variety of topics including religious authority, the public sphere, colonial archives, material texts, histories of printing, manuscript cultures, and historiographies of religion in America. His second book project will be a biography of eighteenth-century minister Charles Chauncy, whose secret conversion from Calvinism to Universalism facilitated the institutional transformations of New England religion into its liberal strains by the nineteenth century.
Professor Baysa has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Religion and American Culture, Religion Compass, and Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, and his commentaries on religion in public life have appeared in outlets like the Political Theology Network, The University of Chicago Divinity School’s Sightings, Princeton Theological Seminary’s Center for Asian American Christianity online publications, and Patheos’ Anxious Bench. His research has been supported by research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He has also presented his research at various conferences, including the annual meetings for the American Academy of Religion (AAR), Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), American Society of Church History (ASCH), and Conference on Faith and History (CFH).
Prior to his position at the University of Vermont, Professor Baysa has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and New York University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton’s Department of Religion in 2023, his S.T.M at Boston University in 2017, and M.Div. at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 2016. He also holds a B.A. in Business Administration from Boston University’s Questrom School of Management and worked as a paralegal in a financial services company for five years before starting his doctoral program.
“My research explores the untold mechanisms, hidden decision-makers, and self-effacing middlemen that shape what we think of as religion. I’m particularly interested in the cultural and at times, boring bureaucratic processes, that get us to overlook the spiritual, supernatural, or transcendent dimensions of our objects and people of study.”
Bio
Professor Baysa is a scholar of religion in America and historian of Christianity, with particular interest in the history of media technological infrastructures to facilitate religious expression, dialogue, and debate. Professor Baysa’s current book manuscript, Sacred Voices, Printed Silences: The Struggle Against Protestant Dominance in Early American Publishing, is under contract with NYU Press as part of their North American Religions Series and scheduled for publication Spring 2027. It addresses a wide variety of topics including religious authority, the public sphere, colonial archives, material texts, histories of printing, manuscript cultures, and historiographies of religion in America. His second book project will be a biography of eighteenth-century minister Charles Chauncy, whose secret conversion from Calvinism to Universalism facilitated the institutional transformations of New England religion into its liberal strains by the nineteenth century.
Professor Baysa has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Religion and American Culture, Religion Compass, and Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, and his commentaries on religion in public life have appeared in outlets like the Political Theology Network, The University of Chicago Divinity School’s Sightings, Princeton Theological Seminary’s Center for Asian American Christianity online publications, and Patheos’ Anxious Bench. His research has been supported by research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. He has also presented his research at various conferences, including the annual meetings for the American Academy of Religion (AAR), Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), American Society of Church History (ASCH), and Conference on Faith and History (CFH).
Prior to his position at the University of Vermont, Professor Baysa has taught at Washington University in St. Louis and New York University. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton’s Department of Religion in 2023, his S.T.M at Boston University in 2017, and M.Div. at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 2016. He also holds a B.A. in Business Administration from Boston University’s Questrom School of Management and worked as a paralegal in a financial services company for five years before starting his doctoral program.
“My research explores the untold mechanisms, hidden decision-makers, and self-effacing middlemen that shape what we think of as religion. I’m particularly interested in the cultural and at times, boring bureaucratic processes, that get us to overlook the spiritual, supernatural, or transcendent dimensions of our objects and people of study.”