BIO
Professor Baysa explores questions around race and religion through the histories of media technologies. His current area of research examines different perspectives on print technology as a way of exploring the mechanical and relational limits on media production to facilitate religious expression, dialogue, and debate. His work 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 the Americas. He received his Ph.D.in Religion from Princeton University, M.Div. from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and B.S. Business Administration and S.T.M. from Boston University. Prior to coming to UVM, Baysa taught at Washington University in St. Louis and New York University. His work has been supported by fellowships from Library Company of Philadelphia, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia, and the John C. Danforth Center in Religion and Politics at Washington University.
“My research explores the hidden actors, middlemen, and cultural brokers who materially produced the sources we use to study race and religion. What mechanisms enabled certain religious texts and voices to appear or disappear from our archives? Why did publishers’ decisions reflect religious biases, even if their motives were not outrightly theological or discriminatory? How did they make material texts to function as sites where contestation and negotiation between authors, printers, editors, distributors, and readers are both possible and/or are constrained? Exploring the relationship between religious communities, the networks of intermediaries that make them public, and the imagined audiences for their cultural productions, allows us trace how religion continues to shape public discourse in the modern period. In my research and teaching, I encourage greater attention and specificity to a myriad of actors that shape our reading and engagement with sources on religion, race, and media.”
Bio
Professor Baysa explores questions around race and religion through the histories of media technologies. His current area of research examines different perspectives on print technology as a way of exploring the mechanical and relational limits on media production to facilitate religious expression, dialogue, and debate. His work 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 the Americas. He received his Ph.D.in Religion from Princeton University, M.Div. from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and B.S. Business Administration and S.T.M. from Boston University. Prior to coming to UVM, Baysa taught at Washington University in St. Louis and New York University. His work has been supported by fellowships from Library Company of Philadelphia, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Antiquarian Society, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies in Philadelphia, and the John C. Danforth Center in Religion and Politics at Washington University.
“My research explores the hidden actors, middlemen, and cultural brokers who materially produced the sources we use to study race and religion. What mechanisms enabled certain religious texts and voices to appear or disappear from our archives? Why did publishers’ decisions reflect religious biases, even if their motives were not outrightly theological or discriminatory? How did they make material texts to function as sites where contestation and negotiation between authors, printers, editors, distributors, and readers are both possible and/or are constrained? Exploring the relationship between religious communities, the networks of intermediaries that make them public, and the imagined audiences for their cultural productions, allows us trace how religion continues to shape public discourse in the modern period. In my research and teaching, I encourage greater attention and specificity to a myriad of actors that shape our reading and engagement with sources on religion, race, and media.”