DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Phil Davis is a doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at Northwestern University. He studies evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in North America with a particular interest in how Christians have engaged the presence of God and other beings through their bodies. His dissertation project is rooted in historical research on Pentecostal and Charismatic healing evangelists active in the healing revivals and Latter Rain Movement of the mid-twentieth century. Specifically, he examines healers’ claims that God has brought dead people back to life, usually through divine healing prayer, and that human beings do not have to die. Taking careful stock of social contexts, ethical questions, and his subjects’ relationships to modern medicine, he tracks how such miraculous reversals and deferrals of death become plausible and real. He works primarily as a historian, but incorporates anthropological approaches and sensitivity to theology into his project as well. By examining resurrections, which mark a limit case of Pentecostal-Charismatic divine healing, Phil reflects on the capacities of the tools available to scholars of religion for studying miracles. He was awarded the John F. Wilson Research Fellowship of the American Society of Church History in support of his dissertation research. He will also serve as the Graduate Student Representative on the Council of the American Society of Church History beginning in January 2026.

Phil is deeply committed to undergraduate teaching. He sees the study of religion as an essential avenue for developing a deeper understanding of others’ ways of being as well as our own. After his first year of teaching, the Department of Religious Studies recognized his efforts and enthusiasm by awarding him the George Bond Graduate Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In coordination with the Program in American Studies at Northwestern, he co-advised two undergraduate honors theses with his doctoral advisor, Robert Orsi. Both theses concerned the history of evangelical Christianity in the Americas.

Before entering the PhD program, Phil completed an M.A. in Religion at Yale Divinity School, where he wrote a master’s thesis that analyzed Willow Creek Community Church and its Global Leadership Summit as important nodes in turn-of-the-millennium global evangelicalism. He received B.A.s from Northwestern University in Religious Studies and Economics.