The AHA for American Religious Historians

David McConeghy, a Ph.D candidate in religious studies at UC-Santa Barbara, has a nice post for all the American religious historians who will be in attendance at the AHA in New Orleans this weekend.  Here is a taste:

For the third year I’ll be attending the American Historical Association’s annual conference. I like living outside of the American Academy of Religion box. You also can’t go wrong with a conference that is a bit more sensitive to the value of digital humanities and digital age pedagogy. I’m not saying the AAR is filled with luddites, but they have been slower to advance the study of religion into the digital realms.

This year’s AHA conference is focused on the theme “Lives, Places, Stories.” How appropriate for the end of the year of William Cronon’s tenure as AHA president. I’ll definitely be trying to attend his plenary address entitled “Storytelling.”

Here’s an (overly) ambitious schedule of what I’ll be checking out at the conference. [Note: Session numbers are taken from the printed program book.] 

Thursday, January 3 9:00AM – 5:00PM THATCamp AHA 

If I weren’t attending THATCAmp, from 1-3pm I’d head over to Restructuring Religion: American Approaches to Modernism featuring papers by John Corrigan, Elizabeth Clark, and Amanda Porterfield with a response from Kathryn Lofton. Then I’d stick around because from 3:30-5:30 there’s a session called Imagining God’s Kingdom: Natural and Supernatural Landscapes in Nineteeth-Century America. There a quartet of folks I’m not familiar with are presenting fascinating papers on mineral springs, schoolbooks, Antebellum NY’s spiritual landscape, and Sylvester Graham. Leigh Eric Schmidt will respond. Rough to miss both of those on day 1 (both in Sheraton Salon 817)!

Read the rest here.