Grace Christensen
Grace is a doctoral student in American religions. Her research interests focus on how women of the nineteenth century experienced and performed death, grief, and spiritual embodiment; how they imagined the afterlife; and for whom they imagined a heaven. She explores these interests through a historical, theological, and theoretical reading of Spiritualist literature, peeling back the layers of sentimentalist disquisition to reveal an eschatological confluence of gender, race, and class. The antebellum grave resounds with the question – who is deserving of heaven? Grace further hopes to ask how the intervening intersections of gender, race, and class shaped the Spiritualist experience of the afterlife. How did historical women create heaven in their own image? What were the spiritual, political, and interpersonal fruits of this endeavor? Grace’s M.A. thesis “‘Mystery Is as Old as Life’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Explorations of the Otherworldly” received honors. Her advisor is Robert Orsi.