Sally Promey

Sally Promey is Professor of American Studies; and Deputy Director and Professor of Religion and Visual Culture, Yale Institute of Sacred Music.  She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religious Studies.  In 2008-2009, she is Acting Chair of the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Also beginning this year, she directs the Yale Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, generously supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.  Her scholarship explores the visual and material cultures of religions in the United States from the early colonial period through the present.  She is author of two award-winning books: Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s “Triumph of Religion” at the Boston Public Library (Princeton, 1999; American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion) and Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Indiana, 1993; Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art) as well as contributing author and co-editor of The Visual Culture of American Religions (California, 2001).  Among her recent articles and book chapters are essays titled “Mirror Images:  Framing the Self in Early New England Material Piety”; “Taste Cultures and the Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940-1965”; “Situating Visual Culture”; and “The ‘Return’ of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art.”  Promey is recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Fellowship, two Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowships (1993 and 2003) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers. In 2001 she received the Regent’s Faculty Award for Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity from the University System of Maryland and in 2002 the Kirwan Faculty Research and Scholarship Prize of the University of Maryland. In 2004 she was Senior Historian in Residence for the Terra Summer Residency Program in Giverny, France. She serves on the editorial boards of Material Religion, American Art, and Winterthur Portfolio, on the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and on the Advisory Committee of the Center for Historic American Visual Culture.  Her current book project, Religion in Plain View: The Public Aesthetics of American Belief, examines the public display of religion in the United States from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first.  She is also completing research for another book, Written on the Heart: Protestant Visual Culture in the United States.