Brook Wilensky-Lanford

2021-2022 Postdoctoral Research Associate

brookwl@virginia.edu

Ph.D., Religion in the Americas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A., Religion in the Americas, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.F.A., Nonfiction Writing, Columbia University
B.A., Wesleyan University

SPECIALTIES

American religious history, religion and literature, race and racialization, public scholarship

Brook is a postdoctoral research associate working with the Virginia Center for the Study of Religion. Her dissertation, “Keep the Pearly Gates Ajar For Me: The Racial Politics of Heavenly Accessibility, 1868-1909” follows the reception history of the bestselling sentimental novel The Gates Ajar from the Civil War to Jim Crow, arguing that its apparently radical vision of an afterlife open to all dissipated throughout the “long Reconstruction” era. She is also the author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden (Grove Press, 2011), and the former editor-in-chief of the online literary magazine Killing the Buddha.de Mormonism in the Pacific and the Pacific diaspora, as well as investigating connections between money, food, bodies, and religion.