Associate Professor of Religious Studies and chair
Ph.D. Yale University, M.Phil/M.A. Yale University, M.A. New York University, B.B.A. Washburn University
Kati Curts (she/her) is a historian of religion and secularism, focusing on capitalism and popular culture in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States. She is the author of Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America (New York University Press, 2025). Her current research examines modern religious visionaries, divination practices, extractive industry, and genres of storying the past through Hollywood film, Cold War- era opera, frontier folklore, and the museums and archival collections of regional historical societies in the southern and western United States. At Sewanee, Curts teaches courses on religion in American history, technology, entertainment, new religious movements, gender and sexuality, secularism, law, and business, and method and theory in the study of religion.
Dr. Curts studied economics and marketing as an undergraduate before earning M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in Religious Studies at New York University and Yale University. She completed her Ph.D. in American Religious History at Yale in 2016.
Her recent publications have considered religious assemblage at world’s fairs; and the relational worlds of secular icons as produced in composite photography and devotional performance. She is currently working on her first book – a religious history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company – tentatively titled “Fording Religion in the Automobile Age.” This book project contributes to and reflects broader interests in genealogical relations of religion and the technologies, chronologies, aesthetics, economies, and entertainments that are otherwise assumed to be secular.
In addition to the book project, Dr. Curts’ ongoing research centers on theories of religion, history, modernity, and sociality as formed through silver mining operations in the Gilded Age, scrapbooks and vernacular collecting practices, Hollywood filmmaking, Cold War operatics, cigarette advertisements, contemporary art mash-ups, mobile technology platforms, and corporate-sponsored reading clubs.
