Friday Speaker Series: Ingie Hovland

"Christianity and Feminism in a WOman's Life"

Dr. Hovland is a cultural and historical anthropologist of religion, and is especially interested in the many histories, cultural practices, and social effects of Christianity in the world. Her work uses lenses from feminist theory and material religion to trace the interplay of gendered bodies, spaces, and words in particular social situations.

Her first book, Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850-1890 (Brill, 2013), examines how place-making practices on and around new "mission stations" shaped understandings of Protestant Christianity, gender, and race in colonial Southern Africa. 

Her second book, Life in Language: Mission Feminists and the Emergence of a New Protestant Subject is part of the series "Class 200: New Studies in Religion" (Chicago, 2025). It explores the often problematic connection between "women" and "words" in Christianity. She focuses on a case study of the so-called "mission feminists" in early-twentieth-century Norway - a group of women who used new language practices (new ways of speaking, listening, reading, and writing) to advocate for women's greater status in Protestant organizations. Their linguistic experiments combined their words and their bodies in different material-discursive configurations. While scholars often argue that Protestantism drives toward dematerialization, aiming to separate language from materiality, the mission feminists show us the opposite: they give us a glimpse into the material-discursive multiplicity of Protestant modern subjects.

Her current book project is a theoretical introduction to concepts from feminist new materialism and related conversations that can help us better understand the unusual, complicated relations that have developed between subjects and objects in Protestant Christianity, with the working title New Keywords for the Study of Protestantism.