Phillip Davis
Phil Davis is a doctoral student in American Religions. His academic interests center on human engagement with the divine in the modern world, which he plans to engage through historical, ethnographic, and theoretical analysis of American Pentecostalism. Phil hopes to press on the tensions between Pentecostalism and formations of the modern, including the ways that twentieth-century and present-day scholars, journalists, musicians, and other cultural commentators—all of whom produce modern knowledge—have approached and narrated Pentecostal engagement with the divine. Beyond secondary actors, Phil hopes to ask: how do Pentecostals experience the exclusions of the normative modern—embodied, racialized, and gendered—as a result of their engagement with the divine? Likely gateways into these questions include attempts by Pentecostal and Pentecostal-adjacent actors to raise the dead, as well as anti-Pentecostal sentiment and violence. His M.A. thesis at Yale analyzed Willow Creek Community Church and its Global Leadership Summit as important nodes in turn-of-the-millennium global evangelicalism. Before that, he received B.A.s from Northwestern University in Religious Studies and Economics. His adviser is Robert Orsi.