Alison Collis Greene

American Religious History
20th Century United States

228 Allen Hall
Mississippi State University
Mailbox H
Mississippi State, MS 39762
Phone: 662-325-3604
E-mail: agreene@history.msstate.edu

Education
Academic Career
Course Taught Honors and Awards
a href="#presentations">Presentations
a href="#publications">Publications


Research Interests
    I specialize in American religious history and twentieth-century United States history. Within those fields, I am particularly interested in African American history, rural and environmental history, and southern history. My current project traces the transformation of American religious institutions, the evolving relationship between church and state, and the theological reorientation of laypeople and clergy during the Great Depression. I examine the changing religious world of Memphis and the Delta as a whole, drawing out the distinct experiences of men and women, African Americans and whites, and a myriad of faith traditions, but also emphasizing their intersections. I root this project in a national story of religious transformation during one of the most traumatic decades in American history.

Education:

PhD, History, Yale University, 2010
Dissertation: "No Depression in Heaven: Religion and Economic Crisis in Memphis and the Delta, 1929-1941"
Advisor: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

M.A., History, Yale University, 2008
B.A., University of North Carolina, Religious Studies and Anthropology,2001

Academic Career

Assistant Professor of History, Mississippi State University, 2010

Courses Taught

HI 1073: The United States Since 1877
HI 3903: Historiography and Historical Methods
HI 4253: Religion in America
HI 8803: Colloquium in American Religious History
HI 8953: Colloquium in United States History, 1877-1945

Honors/Awards

Edwin W. Small Prize for an outstanding dissertation in United States history, Yale University, 2011
Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, 2009-10
Louisville Institute Honorary Dissertation Fellowship, 2009-10
Lubin-Winant Research Fellowship, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, 2009
Richard J. Franke Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, Yale University, 2005-07
Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, 2004-05
Phi Beta Kappa Society, 2001
Bernard Boyd Memorial Prize, UNC, 2001
Daniel H. Moore Award, UNC, 2000
Morehead Scholar, UNC, 1997-2001

Presentations

"A Reversal of Fortunes: Economic Crisis, Protestant Decline, and the Rise of a New Evangelical Era," American Historical Association Annual Meeting, January 7, 2012

"'I Ain t Bowing Down to Them All the Time': African American Youth and Religion in the Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement," American Studies Association Annual Meeting, October 21, 2011

"Singing to the End: Apocalyptic Music in the Rural South during the Great Depression," Agricultural History Society Annual Meeting, June 17, 2011

"The Christian Left, Agricultural Labor Unions, and the Sacralization of Rural Life in the 1930s," American Historical Association Annual Meeting, January 7, 2011

"The Redemption of Souls and Soils: Religion and the Rural Crisis in the Mississippi Delta,  American Society of Church History Annual Meeting, January 6-9, 2011

Roundtable participant, "The Future of Southern Religious History," American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, November 1, 2010

"Revival or Revolt: Religious Foretelling at the Dawn of the Great Depression," Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., April 7, 2010

"Arenia Mallory and African-American Religious Education in Mississippi during the Great Depression," Southern Association of Women Historians Annual Meeting, Columbia, South Carolina, June 5, 2009

Panel Commenter, "The Rural South," Phi Alpha Theta Mississippi Regional Conference, Mississippi State University, Starkville, Mississippi, April 18, 2009

"'Heavenly Dynamite:' Bishop Alma Bridwell White, Women's Rights, and Anti-Catholicism," American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 17, 2008

"'The Tyrrell Way:' Interracial Religious Activism and White Reaction in 1940s North Carolina," New England Historical Association Meeting, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, April 26, 2008

"'Into the Whirling Hell-Broth:' The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and a Radical Social Critique," American Religious History Working Group, Yale University, Spring 2006

Publications

No Depression in Heaven: Religion and Economic Crisis in Memphis and the Delta, manuscript in progress.

"The End of 'The Protestant Era'?" Church History, September 2011

"The Religion of the 'Flotsam and Jetsam'," The Journal of Southern Religion, Fall 2011

"The Redemption of Souls and Soils: Religion and the Rural Crisis in the Mississippi Delta," in Gods of the River: Religion and Culture along the Mississippi, edited by Michael Pasquier, Indiana University Press, forthcoming