Sonia Hazard
Biographic Data
| ID | 3676602 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sonia Hazard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sonia |
| FAMILY NAME | Hazard |
| SIGNATURE | HAZARD S |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 78 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Sacred Capital
The Joseph Smith Papers
the premise of the academic field of bibliography is that every book is not just a text but also a material object. That shift in perspective opens onto a wider set of questions that one may ask of any book. If a book is an object, what kind of object is it? Why was it made in the way that it was made? For whom, and for what purposes, was the object intended? Finally, how is it used by the different communities that encounter it?These sorts of bi…
The Style of Sincerity
SINCERELY HELD: AMERICAN SECULARISM AND ITS BELIEVERS. By Charles McCrary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. [xiii] + 300. Hardcover, $95. Paper, $30. In Sincerely Held, Charles McCrary approaches free exercise law in terms of a pervasive US obsession with sincerity. What is sincerity? On McCrary's account, it is an “epistemic knowledge regime” (8), a set of “affects” (234), a “common sense” (261), and—in a provocative formulation I…
America's Religious Crossroads
Producing Ancient Scripture
Joseph Smith was, among much else, a translator. One of the most distinctive qualities of early Mormonism is that saving knowledge came not only from revelations—though Smith received plenty of those—but also through texts from the ancient past. In order to be useable as scripture, those texts required translation, and Smith tackled the office of translator with relish. What did translation mean for Smith and early Saints?The editors of Producing…
When the Medium Was the Mission
Reviewed by: When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture by Jenna Supp-Montgomerie Sonia Hazard Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2021) In 1858, the Atlantic Telegraph Company announced the opening of the trans-atlantic telegraph. It barely worked. After three wee…
Make Yourselves Gods
The Politics of Media Format
Nineteenth-century Cherokee printers were media theorists who made political arguments through the materiality of Christian tracts. This article turns to the tract Poor Sarah as an illuminating example, especially because Cherokees published it in two editions in 1833 and 1843, affording a comparative analysis from before and after the tribe's forced removal from Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory. The material qualities of the two editions were…
Special Issue Introduction
This special issue offers a capacious sample of scholarship on religion and material texts in the Americas, and seeks to reveal the potential of material-texts approaches for the study of religion. It features articles by four early-career Americanists (Emily Floyd, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Roxanne Korpan, and Martin Tsang) whose research bridges both areas. Because material texts research typically relies on archives for its source base, I asked t…
How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism
Did Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, really find gold plates? This article considers that basic question from a new materialist perspective. Drawing on textual and material-bibliographical evidence, it argues that Smith, and possibly also a group of witnesses, may have had a formative physical encounter with a set of plates and that this encounter was partly responsible for provoking the events and interpretations that followed. These plat…
Two Ways of Thinking About New Materialism
Now that some of the initial thrill of “new materialism” has faded, the label has been called to answer for a lot. Some of these critiques—its incompatibilities with religious studies, for instance
Agency, the Idea of Agency, and the Problem of Mediation in America's God and Secularism in Antebellum America
A common faith swept the country. According to Mark Noll's now-famous thesis, early republican and antebellum America was characterized by an ideological synthesis of evangelical religion, republican political theory, and common sense epistemology. Noll calls it "the Protestant consensus." John Modern largely agrees. In Modern's telling, antebellum America was mired in the same entanglement of piety, politics, and epistemology. But in lieu of the…
The Material Turn in the Study of Religion
Material things and phenomena have come to vie with belief and thought as worthy subjects of inquiry in the interdisciplinary study of religion. Yet, to the extent that we are justified in speaking of a "material turn", no consensus has arisen about what materiality is or does. This article offers a preliminary sketch of the diverse terrain of material religion studies, delineating three dominant approaches to religious materiality as well as an …
The Material Turn in the Study of Religion
Material things and phenomena have come to vie with belief and thought as worthy subjects of inquiry in the interdisciplinary study of religion. Yet, to the extent that we are justified in speaking of a "material turn", no consensus has arisen about what materiality is or does. This article offers a preliminary sketch of the diverse terrain of material religion studies, delineating three dominant approaches to religious materiality as well as an …
Two Ways of Thinking About New Materialism
Now that some of the initial thrill of “new materialism” has faded, the label has been called to answer for a lot. Some of these critiques—its incompatibilities with religious studies, for instance
How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism
Did Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, really find gold plates? This article considers that basic question from a new materialist perspective. Drawing on textual and material-bibliographical evidence, it argues that Smith, and possibly also a group of witnesses, may have had a formative physical encounter with a set of plates and that this encounter was partly responsible for provoking the events and interpretations that followed. These plat…
Special Issue Introduction
This special issue offers a capacious sample of scholarship on religion and material texts in the Americas, and seeks to reveal the potential of material-texts approaches for the study of religion. It features articles by four early-career Americanists (Emily Floyd, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Roxanne Korpan, and Martin Tsang) whose research bridges both areas. Because material texts research typically relies on archives for its source base, I asked t…
The Politics of Media Format
Nineteenth-century Cherokee printers were media theorists who made political arguments through the materiality of Christian tracts. This article turns to the tract Poor Sarah as an illuminating example, especially because Cherokees published it in two editions in 1833 and 1843, affording a comparative analysis from before and after the tribe's forced removal from Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory. The material qualities of the two editions were…
Agency, the Idea of Agency, and the Problem of Mediation in America's God and Secularism in Antebellum America
A common faith swept the country. According to Mark Noll's now-famous thesis, early republican and antebellum America was characterized by an ideological synthesis of evangelical religion, republican political theory, and common sense epistemology. Noll calls it "the Protestant consensus." John Modern largely agrees. In Modern's telling, antebellum America was mired in the same entanglement of piety, politics, and epistemology. But in lieu of the…
The Material Turn in the Study of Religion
Material things and phenomena have come to vie with belief and thought as worthy subjects of inquiry in the interdisciplinary study of religion. Yet, to the extent that we are justified in speaking of a "material turn", no consensus has arisen about what materiality is or does. This article offers a preliminary sketch of the diverse terrain of material religion studies, delineating three dominant approaches to religious materiality as well as an …
Agency, the Idea of Agency, and the Problem of Mediation in America's God and Secularism in Antebellum America
A common faith swept the country. According to Mark Noll's now-famous thesis, early republican and antebellum America was characterized by an ideological synthesis of evangelical religion, republican political theory, and common sense epistemology. Noll calls it "the Protestant consensus." John Modern largely agrees. In Modern's telling, antebellum America was mired in the same entanglement of piety, politics, and epistemology. But in lieu of the…
Two Ways of Thinking About New Materialism
Now that some of the initial thrill of “new materialism” has faded, the label has been called to answer for a lot. Some of these critiques—its incompatibilities with religious studies, for instance
Special Issue Introduction
This special issue offers a capacious sample of scholarship on religion and material texts in the Americas, and seeks to reveal the potential of material-texts approaches for the study of religion. It features articles by four early-career Americanists (Emily Floyd, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Roxanne Korpan, and Martin Tsang) whose research bridges both areas. Because material texts research typically relies on archives for its source base, I asked t…
How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism
Did Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, really find gold plates? This article considers that basic question from a new materialist perspective. Drawing on textual and material-bibliographical evidence, it argues that Smith, and possibly also a group of witnesses, may have had a formative physical encounter with a set of plates and that this encounter was partly responsible for provoking the events and interpretations that followed. These plat…
Producing Ancient Scripture
Joseph Smith was, among much else, a translator. One of the most distinctive qualities of early Mormonism is that saving knowledge came not only from revelations—though Smith received plenty of those—but also through texts from the ancient past. In order to be useable as scripture, those texts required translation, and Smith tackled the office of translator with relish. What did translation mean for Smith and early Saints?The editors of Producing…
When the Medium Was the Mission
Reviewed by: When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture by Jenna Supp-Montgomerie Sonia Hazard Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2021) In 1858, the Atlantic Telegraph Company announced the opening of the trans-atlantic telegraph. It barely worked. After three wee…
Make Yourselves Gods
The Politics of Media Format
Nineteenth-century Cherokee printers were media theorists who made political arguments through the materiality of Christian tracts. This article turns to the tract Poor Sarah as an illuminating example, especially because Cherokees published it in two editions in 1833 and 1843, affording a comparative analysis from before and after the tribe's forced removal from Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory. The material qualities of the two editions were…
America's Religious Crossroads
The Joseph Smith Papers
the premise of the academic field of bibliography is that every book is not just a text but also a material object. That shift in perspective opens onto a wider set of questions that one may ask of any book. If a book is an object, what kind of object is it? Why was it made in the way that it was made? For whom, and for what purposes, was the object intended? Finally, how is it used by the different communities that encounter it?These sorts of bi…
The Style of Sincerity
SINCERELY HELD: AMERICAN SECULARISM AND ITS BELIEVERS. By Charles McCrary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. [xiii] + 300. Hardcover, $95. Paper, $30. In Sincerely Held, Charles McCrary approaches free exercise law in terms of a pervasive US obsession with sincerity. What is sincerity? On McCrary's account, it is an “epistemic knowledge regime” (8), a set of “affects” (234), a “common sense” (261), and—in a provocative formulation I…
Sacred Capital
History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Art (5 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Mormonism, Religion, and History (5 works) · American Constitutional Law and Politics (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Epistemology (3 works)