Alexandra Prince
Assistant Professor
Department of Religious Studies
Office: Ladd 205B
Phone: (518) 580-8404
Email: aprince@skidmore.edu
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.