Kathryn Reklis

Kathryn Reklis came to Fordham in 2012 after earning her PhD from Yale University,
with prior degrees from Yale Divinity School, and undergraduate study in English
Literature, creative writing, and documentary photography at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature and
American Studies. Blending methods from cultural history, critical theory, and
literary study, she is interested in the conditions of possibility that make religious
belief and practice possible at any given moment. This means that she examines the
historical context, material conditions, intellectual histories, personal relationships,
affective states, and networks of exchange and power that contribute to different
ways of being religious at different times and places. Most of her work is explores
different ways religious people appeal to beauty, art, and embodied experience as
an alternative to the aridity and rationalism they perceive in modernity. She is also
interested in how art and aesthetic experience are imagined to exist in and out of
secular modes of knowing and being. Her work is focused on modern Protestant
Christian history (18th-20th century) in the colonial context, but she is also interested
in what theology does in the world today and how it does it as well as other forms of
religious subjectivity outside or at the margins of Christianity. She writes extensively
about popular culture for both academic and popular audiences.

She is currently finishing a book on the mid-twentieth century American author
Shirley Jackson, called Haunted: The Spiritual Power of Shirley Jackson (under
contract with the University of Chicago Press as part of the Iconologies series). The
project is a cultural history of Jackson’s life and work that asks what we can learn
about religion and literature – and our own longings to infuse literature with
religious-ness – if we explore the creepy, haunting, unsettling, wild feelings
generated by Jackson’s writing.

From Fall 2024-Spring 2026 she was a Scholar-in-Residence at the Social and Moral
Cognition Lab at Columbia University where she worked with a team of experimental
psychologists to investigate attitudes toward risk and reward that might help us
understand religiously motivated climate-change denial and activate climate action.

Her first book-length project, Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan
Edwards and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2014), examines
Jonathan Edwards’s contribution to the public debates around the ecstatic and
excessive bodily performances of 18th century religious revivals as a way of tracing
an alternative modern subjectivity to the one being forged in the confluence of early
global capitalism and early Enlightenment rationalism. Situating Edwards in
conversation with discourses about the making of modernity in the 18th century also
relocates North American Reformed theology in its circum-Atlantic context, a
context that describes the exchange of goods and ideas in circulation from Europe,

Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas that created the material conditions for
modernity.

Growing out of this project, she co-edited, along with Sarah Covington, Protestant
Aesthetics and the Arts (Routledge, 2020) to challenge the old bromide that
"Protestants did away with aesthetics." The volume brings together scholars working
across all five-hundred years of Protestant history and aesthetic realities from early
German churches to Mexican Pentecostal "kitsch" and 18th-century hymnody to
Korean fan dances.

At Fordham, she teaches courses on modern Christian history, colonialism and
empire, aesthetics and modernity, digital religion, and American Evangelicalism. She
has regularly taught the American Studies Senior Seminar and advises
undergraduates in Theology, Comparative Literature, and American Studies. 

From 2018-2020 she served as the principal investigator for a grant on Shaker Art,
Design, and Religion (funded by the Henry Luce Foundation) in partnership with the
Shaker Museum New Lebanon which brought together academics from religious
studies and art history with practicing artists and museum professionals to explore
Shaker legacy and public memory. From 2010-2017 she was a Research Fellow for
the New Media Project at the Christian Theological Seminary, where she wrote
regularly on theology, religious practice, and new media use and with whom she
orchestrated a teaching program on new media and theology at Fordham. She was
the Co-Director of the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice, which she co-
founded in 2009 with artist AA Bronson. And she is the Screentime columnist and a
Contributing Editor for The Christian Century. She is an avid TV watcher and a PTA
mom who lives in Astoria, Queens with her spouse and children.

PhD, Religious Studies (Theology), Yale University (2012) with distinction

MAR, Historical Theology, Yale Divinity School (2004), summa cum laude

BA, English/Creative Writing, University of North Carolina (2001), summa cum laude

• Modern Protestant theology (18th century to the present)

• Colonialism/decolonialism

• Aesthetics

• Religion and Literature

• Digital religion

• Theology, religious practice, and popular culture

“They Will Know You by Your Love (for Robots): Technology, Relationality, and AI
Fictions,” Modern Theology, Vol. 42, Issue 3 (July 2026): 526-542

“Fear and the Spectacle of Alien Invasion,” First Contact: Aliens and Humans in
Contemporary Science Fiction, edited by Frank Bosman, Mathilde van Dijk, and Floris
van der Tak (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)

Protestant Aesthetics and the Arts, co-edited with Sarah Covington (Routledge Press, 2020).

“Imagination and Hermeneutics,” Oxford Handbook on Jonathan Edwards, edited by Douglas Sweeney and Jan Stievermann, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Can Theology Be Postsecular? Aesthetics and Non-Triumphalist Theology,” The Journal of Religion, Vol. 98, Issue 3, July 2018, pp. 371-397.

“Aesthetics of the ‘Made’: Exuberant Authenticity in the Work of Wes Anderson,” Dreams, Doubt, and Dread: the Spiritual in Film. Edited by Taylor Worley and Zac Settle (Cascade Books, 2016).

Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2014).

“Reflections on Art and Sensory Contention at a Christian Seminary,: Sensational Religion: Sense and Contention in Material Practice. Edited by Sally Promey, Yale University Press (2014).

“Heroism in the Age of Terror: the Dark Knight of the American Soul,” Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul. Edited by David P. Gushee, J. Drew Zimmer, and Jillian Hickman Zimmer. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010.

“A Sense of the Tragic in a Christian Theology of Freedom,” Theological Studies, Mar 2009, Vol. 70 Issue 1, p 37-60.

Screentime Column, The Christian Century (ongoing monthly column on television, film, and other screened pursuits)