I’m A.T. Coates, a PhD Candidate in the Duke University Graduate Program in Religion. I study the history of religions in America, specializing in conservative Christian visual culture in the 20th century. My advisor is David Morgan, author of Protestants and Pictures, Visual Piety, and The Embodied Eye. I work as an editorial assistant at Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief. I’m also a contributor to the Religion Bulletin blog. You can contact me by email: coatesat@gmail.com

I spend most of my time looking at picture Bibles, Chick tracts, dispensationalist prophecy charts, creationist museum displays, Basil Wolverton’s nuclear apocalypses, and Spire “Christian Archie” comics. I’m developing a side interest in “supernaturalism” and American culture: ghosts, vampires, zombies, and the theories that help us unpack them. I’m planning to write a dissertation about conservative Protestant aesthetics c. 1910-1960. I’m interested in the sensations, materialities, media, and technologies of what we end up studying as “religion.” When it comes to fundamentalists, I plan to explore the body techniques, networks of objects/pictures/people, and discursive conditions that allowed something called “fundamentalism” to emerge.

I’M BLOGGING MY PRELIMS! For the next few months, I’ll be reading about a book a day to study for my prelims. If you’re interested in American religious history, religious studies theory, or if you’re a student who’s just too lazy to do these readings yourself, check out my posts. I welcome corrections, comments, and feedback of all kinds.

The current header image on my site comes from an extreme close-up of a section called “The Lake of Fire” on Clarence Larkin’s dispensationalist chart “Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth” (1920).