Faculty Research Fellows Lunch with Kathryn Gin Lum

Kathryn Gin Lum: "The Heathen in the American Imagination"

If ever there was an antiquated category, “heathen” would seem to be it. And yet the concept has had long-lasting implications for Americans’ view of the world. Kathryn Gin Lum looks at how religion, race, and gender work together to construct the “heathen” in the nineteenth-century American imagination. She then explores how the category continues to resonate past the decline of the term itself.

Kathryn Gin Lum is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, and by courtesy, History.