Randall J. Stephens
Associate Professor, University of Oslo
Randall J. Stephens is an Associate Professor of British and American Studies at the University of Oslo. He is a historian of religion, the South, and popular culture. He is the author The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South (Harvard University Press, 2008); The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, co-authored with physicist Karl Giberson (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); and editor of Recent Themes in American Religious History (University of South Carolina Press, 2009). His latest book is The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll (Harvard University Press, 2018). Stephens has written for the Atlantic,Salon, the Wilson Quarterly, Christian Century, the Independent, History Today, the Chronicle of Higher Ed, and the New York Times. In 2012 he was a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies in Norway.
Featured Publications
“Culture, Entertainment, and Religion in America,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia(Oxford University Press, 2018).
“Evangelicals and Trump—Lessons from the Nixon Era,” The Conversation, UPI, History News Network, June 15, 2018.
“God Gave Rock and Roll to You,” History Today, May 16, 2018
“The Klan, White Christianity, and the Past and Present: A Response to Kelly Baker’s Essay,” Religion and Culture Forum (Chicago Divinity School), (June 2017).
“The Bible and Fundamentalism,” in The Oxford Handbook on the Bible in America, ed. Paul Gutjahr (Oxford University Press, 2017).
“Richard Nixon’s Authoritarian Loathing of the Media Lives on in Donald Trump,” The Conversation, February 22, 2017; Raw Story, February 22, 2017.
“Popular Culture and Pentecostalism: Comparing Britain and the United States,” in Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World, eds. David Hempton and Hugh McLeod (Oxford University Press, 2017).
“Recent Developments in the Study of Religion in the US” for “Getting Religion: A Roundtable on the Study of Religion and the US,” Journal of American Studies (2017).
“Of Gods, Presence, Abundant History, and the Challenges of Studying Everyday Religion,” Fides et Historia (Summer/Fall 2016).
“‘It has to come from the hearts of the people’: Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Race, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Journal of American Studies (August 2016).
“‘Where else did they copy their styles but from church groups?’ Rock ‘n’ Roll and Pentecostalism in the 1950s South,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture (March 2016).
“From Abolitionists to Fundamentalists: The Transformation of the Wesleyan Methodists in the 19thand 20thCenturies,” American Nineteenth Century History(May 2015).
“Understanding the Prosperity Gospel,” Fides et Historia 47:2 (Summer/Fall 2015).
