About

Sally Promey is the Caroline Washburn Professor of Religion and Visual Culture at Yale University, with appointments in American Studies, Religious Studies, and Divinity (Institute of Sacred Music), and a faculty affiliation in the History of Art. She is the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR). Prior to her tenure at Yale, she was chair and professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland, where she taught for the first fifteen years of her career. Her scholarship explores the relationships among visual, material, sensory, and spatial cultures and religions in the United States from the colonial period through the present, with a focus on how public space is saturated with religious display and the ways in which display functions as a Protestant technology of White nation formation. Her recent work includes a book titled 'Religion in Plain View: Public Aesthetics of American Display,' which analyzes land-shaping practices such as street arts, parades, signage, monuments, and zoning regulations, revealing their role in shaping racialized religious and national identities. Promey's research also extends into projects examining Protestant aesthetic cultures, critiques of the category 'folk' in relation to religion and race, and the indigenous Hawaiian religious foundations of American art criticism. She has contributed to and edited numerous scholarly publications, and her work has received prestigious awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Charles C. Eldredge Prize. Promey serves on editorial boards, is an affiliate of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, and is a National Research Fellow of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. At Yale, she has held leadership roles including chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Deputy Director of the Institute of Sacred Music, and currently convenes the Sensory Cultures of Religion Research Group.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Cognitive psychology
• Geochemistry
• Earth science
• History
• Geology
• Geography
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Tree Rings and Blood Lines

  MAVCOR Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  These redwood rings are both family trees and family circles, literally naturalizing a canonical “American” familial heritage insistently recited and instantiated in many media and locations: artistic and built environments, judicial practice, legislation and policy, textbooks, land use, and national land theory. Heritage is a family business.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• American Performances, Economies, and Genealogies of Constraint

  MAVCOR Journal · 2022-01-01

  articleOpen access

  In this collaboratively written exercise, the authors discuss the material significance of embodied sense perceptions and affects. Despite Protestant secularity’s claims to the contrary, sensation and affect are no more confined to interiorized subjective mental states than is religion merely belief.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Collaboration and Access in the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion

  2021-02-19

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• 37. Religion, Sensation, and Materiality: A Conclusion

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Aesthetics
  • Art
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• 36. Spiritual Sensations and Material Transformations in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • History
  • Geology
  PublisherDOI

• 1. Religion, Sensation, and Materiality: An Introduction

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2020 · 16 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Aesthetics
  • Art
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Collaborative scholarly communities and access in the study of material and visual cultures of religion

  Religion · 2018-04-02 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  The Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale University (MAVCOR) does not simply, or even most fundamentally, shape a physical center at Yale University. Although MAVCOR organizes events at Yale and coordinates project cycles involving Yale affiliates as well as scholars from other universities in the United States and around the world, much of MAVCOR’s activity is conducted online. MAVCOR publishes a born-digital, open-access double-blind peer-reviewed journal, MAVCOR Journal. It also features a born-digital exhibition space, the Material Objects Archive. In at least two ways, MAVCOR is deliberately interstitial, invested in the connective spaces between both disciplines and technologies. First, the Center emerged from a desire to promote interdisciplinary conversation among scholars of religion, art history, anthropology, and others engaged with our subjects of inquiry. We have aimed to accomplish this goal by shaping a forum for conversation and an archive for mutual use. Second, MAVCOR engages the need to form a space for peer-reviewed content online in a manner that emphasizes the mutually beneficial relationship of print and digital modes of inquiry. In this work, MAVCOR’s overarching commitment is to promote innovative, substantively researched, thoughtfully constructed scholarship, with robust interdisciplinarity as a fundamental element of form and content.

  PublisherDOI

• Elijah Pierce and Material Conversions

  MAVCOR Journal · 2018-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Obey God and Live (Vision of Heaven) is Elijah Pierce’s personal conversion narrative. In this piece of wood he depicted the definitive episode of his own spiritual autobiography, an event in his past that he understood to (re)organize, interpret, and frame his entire life.

  PublisherDOI

• Chalkware

  Conversations An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion · 2015-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chalkware, Plaster, Plaster of Paris

  Conversations An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion · 2014-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, in Europe and the United States, chalkware accomplished for three-dimensional devotional objects what chromolithography managed for images in two dimensions. Both of these visual and sensory technologies, furthermore, came into common usage just as European and American Christian missionary activity entered a new phase of domestic and global enterprise. These media and their suitability to emerging capital marketplaces in a period of empire building (religious and otherwise) facilitated the export and inculcation of Western Christian ideas, beliefs, and values.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Emily C. Floyd

  1 shared

• Jane F. Crosthwaite

  1 shared

• Miriam Stewart

  1 shared

• David Morgan

  1 shared

• Paul Eli Ivey

  1 shared

• Emily Floyd

  University College London

  1 shared

• Leigh Eric Schmidt

  1 shared

• Margaretta M. Lovell

  1 shared

Labs

• Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR)PI

Awards & honors

• American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the his…
• Charles C. Eldredge Prize for outstanding scholarship in Ame…
• Guggenheim Fellowship
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Univers…
• Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowships (1993 and 2003) at the…