BIO
Professor Baysa is a scholar of religion, history, and media, with particular interest in the mechanical and cultural constraints on media production to facilitate religious expression, dialogue, and debate. Professor Baysa’s current book manuscript, under contract with NYU Press titled “Unpublishing Religion: Race, Heterodoxy, and the Printing Press in Early America” 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. He 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 has 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.
Professor Baysa’s work 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, He 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 middlemen, and cultural brokers that shaped what we think of when we call something in the past and present “religion.” I’m particularly interested in interrogating what we might describe as “secular” or “non-religious,” and the power of cultural processes to 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, history, and media, with particular interest in the mechanical and cultural constraints on media production to facilitate religious expression, dialogue, and debate. Professor Baysa’s current book manuscript, under contract with NYU Press titled “Unpublishing Religion: Race, Heterodoxy, and the Printing Press in Early America” 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. He 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 has 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.
Professor Baysa’s work 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, He 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 middlemen, and cultural brokers that shaped what we think of when we call something in the past and present “religion.” I’m particularly interested in interrogating what we might describe as “secular” or “non-religious,” and the power of cultural processes to get us to overlook the spiritual, supernatural, or transcendent dimensions of our objects and people of study.