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 cultural historian of American religions, community-engaged digital and public humanities scholar, and Catskills naturalist. My interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching bridge U.S. history, religious studies, mad studies, and Indigenous studies. My first book, Mad Religion: Faith, Insanity, and the Making of Religious Difference in America, is under contract with the University of Illinois Press.

My digital and public humanities work increasingly focuses on place-based and reparative approaches to history. Since 2022, I have collaborated with Skidmore students on the Jonestown Transcription Project, which supports Jonestown & Peoples Temple: A Digital Archive. To date, we have transcribed more than 1,500 pages from the Letters to Dad collection, making the writings of Jonestown residents more accessible for research and public engagement. I am currently developing a digital humanities site and edited volume to further preserve, contextualize, and share these letters.

Beginning in 2023, I partnered with Skidmore’s John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) to contribute to the Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community Archives through digitization, transcription, and community-engaged student projects.

In November 2025, I worked alongside Kanien’kehá (Mohawk) Elder and Storyteller Kay Olan, community and campus leader Thomas Chretien, and members of Skidmore’s Indigenization and Decolonization Collaborative (IDC) to replant a Tree of Peace on campus and install a marker recognizing the Tree of Peace at High Rock Park in downtown Saratoga Springs. Building on this work, I am developing an ArcGIS StoryMap tracing the history of the Tree of Peace Society, founded by Kanien’kehá leader Jake Swamp, including the Society’s relationship with Skidmore College.

Fun facts: In 2016, I solo-canoed the entire 363-mile length of the Erie Canal with an American cocker spaniel. In 2026, I canoed 100 miles of the Hudson River estuary with an English cocker spaniel and hope to complete the journey down to NYC next summer.

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

• “Project Allows Students to Contribute to History.” Jonestown & Peoples Temple: A Digital Archive. October 19, 2026. https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=132338
• “‘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.