The Palace of the Thundering Gods – Synthesizing Colonial American Religious History: A Virtual Round Table

The Palace of Thundering Gods is a freely accessible, open-source resource that tells the history of Religion in the United States. It has been created through the collaboration of over 100 scholars to create what they hope will be an “accessible yet rigorous history” of religion in the United States. 

Join us to hear from the scholars working on the Colonial American religious history segments of the new resource in this virtual roundtable.  

To reckon with the American past, it is necessarily to reckon with the history of American religion. But American religion has never been singular. Far from static or stable, it exists in a state of unending transformation, perpetually being made and remade across the centuries. Nor is it monolithic. 

This event is free and open to all, but registration is required. Click here to register.

After registering, you will receive an email with information about attending the webinar.   

Email any questions to programs@14beacon.org. 

Speakers

All speaker information forthcoming.

Michael Baysa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Vermont. His research focuses on the history of religious publishing and the printing press in early America. His current book manuscript, Sacred Voices, Printed Silences: The Struggle Against Protestant Dominance in Early American Publishing (NYU Press, 2027), explores the publishing difficulties faced by racialized and heterodox writers across early British North America. His second book project will be a biography of eighteenth-century Boston minister Charles Chauncy. 

Saffron Hooper Sener (she/her) is a feminist scholar of early modern North American environmental history. A Ph.D. Candidate in History at Harvard University, she focuses on histories of gender, sexuality, and medicine as they intersect with the unique ecologies of the American West. Sener is a graduate of UC Berkeley with a degree in History and the History of Art; driven by intertwined scholarly and artistic practices, her research engages visual and material cultures both as subject matter and methodology.

Katy Telling is the John Carter Brown Library 2026 Postdoc Program Coordinator in Providence, Rhode Island. She is an historian of gender, religion, and power in early America, with an emphasis on the history of early American Quakers. Her dissertation examined Quaker meetings’ interventions in private households and familial life in the early South and she is currently working on a larger project interrogating the intersections of gender, militarism, and religiously-motivated antiwar pacifism in early American life. Telling is also the Productions Editor for Commonplace Journal. She edited Chapter 2: Colonial Foundations (1650-1720) for The Palace of Thundering Gods. 

Anthony Trujillo is Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Harvard University from Ohkay Owingeh, one of the five Tewa speaking pueblos on the upper Rio Grande. His work sits at the intersection of Native American and Indigenous Studies, early American history, literary studies and religion and investigates the multiple modalities through which Indigenous peoples and nations engender dynamic spaces of meaning, connection and power in colonial contexts.