Alexandra Prince

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Phone: 518-580-8404
Email: aprince@skidmore.edu
Office: Ladd 205B

Education:

PhD, History, University at Buffalo (2020)
MA, History & Media, University at Albany (2014)
BA, History & Religious Studies, McGill University (2009)

Bio:

I am a historian of American religions and community-engaged digital humanities scholar focused on the cultural history of American and Indigenous new religious traditions. Currently, I am working on my first book project, Mad Religion: Faith and Insanity in America, which explores the contentious history of bio-psychiatric interpretations of American religious life.

Since 2022, I have collaborated with Skidmore students on the Jonestown Transcription Project, which contributes to Jonestown and Peoples: A Digital Archive.

In collaboration with MDOCS, I contribute to the Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community Archives project through digitization, transcription and service-learning projects.

Research and teaching interests:

American Religious History;
Mad Studies;
New Religious Movements;
Indigenous Studies;
History of Psychiatry;
Religion and the Law;
American Print Cultures;
Digital Humanities

Courses taught:

Studying Religion in America
Indigenous Religious Freedom
Religion and Madness
Peoples Temple and Jonestown
Queering Religion
Nonhuman Worlds (Scribner Seminar)
Allies in Learning and Teaching

Selected publications:

“‘If you don’t love children, you don’t understand socialism’: The Children of Peoples Temple.” In
Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present, edited by Victoria Wolcott, 143-174. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2024.
“‘Driven Insane by Eddyism’: Christian Science, Popular Psychopathology, and a Turn of the Century Contest over Faith and Madness” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 31, no. 3. December 2021.
“Stirpiculture: Science-Guided Human Propagation and the Oneida Community.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 52, no.1. (2017): 76-99.

Faculty