Heathen: Religion and Race in American History
Kathryn Gin Lum
Stanford University
Americans used to believe that much of the world was populated by “heathens.” What did that view of the world entail? And what are the continuing repercussions on American ideas about race as a “heathen inheritance”?
Kathryn Gin Lum, professor and chair of religion studies at Stanford University, will present the 2025 Alice Eckardt Scholar-in-Residence Lecture. Professor Gin Lum holds her faculty position in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and History (by courtesy) at Stanford University, where she also founded and directs the American Religions in a Global Context Initiative. She is the author of Heathen: Religion and Race in American History (Harvard 2022) and Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford 2014), and co-editor, with Paul Harvey, of The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (Oxford 2018).
