Isaiah Ellis
Assistant Professor of Urban Religions
Education
B.A., Trinity University; M.A., Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Biography
Isaiah Ellis is Assistant Professor of Urban Religions and a member of SMU’s Urban Research Cluster.
Before joining SMU, Dr. Ellis served as an Arts & Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, where he researched and taught in the Department for the Study of Religion. He has also taught courses in religious studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, and in U.S. urban and business history in the Department of History and Geography at Elon University. For the 2024-2025 academic year, he will be based at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has been named a Robert M. Kingdon Fellow.
Dr. Ellis’s research engages a range of historical, anthropological, and religious studies debates about how built environments can become efficacious sites for the enactment and contestation of economic, political, and moral power. He is especially interested in how religious ideas and influences are deployed to enliven nominally secular spaces with unexpected meanings and powers in public life. He understands the relationship between American religious life and American built environments to be mutually transformative—a perspective shaped by the conceptual tools of urban studies and the social-scientific study of infrastructure.
He is currently working on his first book, titled Apostles of Asphalt: Race, Empire, and the Religious Politics of Infrastructure in the American South (under contract, Columbia University Press), which focuses on how the builders of early highways in the Jim Crow-Era South came to see themselves as secular missionaries who were literally building a modern gospel of American civilization, progress, and Confederate “redemption” into the landscape. You can read more about the project .
Beyond his work on the American South, Dr. Ellis’s writing has covered a range of topics, including commercial modernism in Chicago, theories of infrastructure and assemblage, and cities and regions in American identity-making. He is also working on several new projects examining religion in industrial landscapes, tourism and religious corporations, the American citrus industry, what theories of religion and theories of the city have in common, and the formative relationships between religious eclecticism, architectural innovation, and urban planning efforts in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States.
