Roundtable Session In-person November Annual Meeting 2025

Author Meets Readers: Jamie L. Brummitt’s Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This “Author Meets Readers” book panel will consider Jamie L. Brummitt’s Protestant Relics in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2025), a daring new monograph that explores how both early Americans’ emotional grief-work and their politics were literally grounded in holy matter--the relics, remains, and heavenly presences of their sacred dead, including George Washington. Panelists will consider how early American Protestants’ engagement with “supernatural memory objects,” as diverse as Washington’s hair and schoolgirls’ mourning embroidery, founded notions of civil rights, civil religion, race, political belonging, and slavery and freedom in the early American republic. We hope that audience discussion may also turn to the question of whether similar dynamics are in play today.

Tags
#Protestant relics
#Religion in the United States
#death
#mourning
#politics of mourning