Pembroke Center

Lucia Hulsether is a scholar of religion, culture, and politics in North America, with teaching and research specialization in the history and anthropology of Christianity; religion and economy; feminist and queer critique; and critical pedagogy. She is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Skidmore College and currently in residence at Brown with support from the Religious Studies Department and the Pembroke Center.

 Lucia’s first book, Capitalist Humanitarianism, was published in 2023 with Duke University Press. This book tracks the rise of post-1945 capitalist reform initiatives piloted by liberal and left Christians, including fair trade, microfinance, corporate social responsibility, and related efforts. Blending historical and ethnographic styles, and working in the tradition of left cultural studies, the book coins “capitalist humanitarianism” to describe not only this constellation of projects but also a logic that manages their contradictions: the continually deferred hope that consumer and investor transactions in the global north can forge feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial solidarities with people in the global south. Capitalist Humanitarianism won the First Book Prize from the 2024 Cultural Studies Association.

 In addition to her book, Lucia’s scholarship has appeared in differences, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Public Culture, and Religion and American Culture, as well as edited volumes and various popular venues. She is currently working on two interconnected book projects on the religious history of civic education in the United States. While at Brown—where she was also in residence in 2024-25 as a Senior Fellow in Race and Ethnicity—she has taught classes like “The Christian Right,” “Secularism and Secularity,” “Religion, Sex, and Citizenship,” and “Critiques of Religion and Capitalism.”

Lucia holds a PhD in Religious Studies at Yale University, her Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, and her Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies and Sociology/Anthropology from Agnes Scott College.