Martha L. Finch

Short Biography

Martha L. Finch’s research area is American religious history, with a focus on religion and the body, including food, dress, sexuality, and ritual, in early New England. She has authored articles in this area for Church History, A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (ed. J. M. Lindman & M. L. Tarter, Cornell 2001), and Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias (Nebraska 2006), which she also co-edited with Etta M. Madden. Her book, Dissenting Bodies: Corporealities in Early New England (Columbia, forthcoming 2009), argues that the human body was at the center of Puritan theology and colonists’ understandings of their everyday lives and relations with others, such as New England Indians. Her current research project is a history of dress in American Protestantism. She has held research fellowships from the Pew Program in Religion and American History at Yale University and the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University, and was a Young Scholar in American Religion at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI. Finch is an associate professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University. She holds a BA in Religion from Syracuse University and a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara.