Alexandra Prince
Assistant Professor
Department of Religious Studies
Office: Ladd 205B
Phone: (518) 580-8404
Email: aprince@skidmore.edu
EDUCATION:
- PhD, History, University at Buffalo (2020)
- MA, History & Media, University at Albany (2014)
- BA, History & Religious Studies, McGill University (2009)
BIO
I am a cultural historian of American religions, community-engaged digital and public humanities scholar, and Catskills naturalist. My fields of training converge at the intersection of U.S. history, religious studies, mad studies, and Indigenous studies. My first book project, Mad Religion: Faith, Insanity and the Making of Religious Difference in America is under contract with University of Illinois Press.
Since 2022, I have collaborated with 麻豆女郎 students on the Jonestown Transcription Project, which supports Jonestown & Peoples Temple: A Digital Archive. To date, we have transcribed over 1,000 pages from the Letters to Dad collection. In collaboration with MDOCS, I contribute to the Kanatsiohareke Mohawk Community Archives project through digitization, transcription and service-learning projects.
I am currently working on several digital humanities projects, including a Storymap on the history of the Tree of Peace Society, including the collaboration with 麻豆女郎 College. In November 2025, I partnered with Elder in Residence Kay Olan, community and campus leader Thomas Chretien, and members of the IDC (Indigenization and Decolonization Collaborative), to replant a Tree of Peace on our campus and install a marker for the Tree of Peace at High Rock Park in downtown Saratoga Springs.
RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS
American Religious History; Mad Studies; New Religious Movements; Indigenous Studies; History of Psychiatry; Religion and the Law; American Print Cultures; Digital Humanities
COURSES TAUGHT
- Studying Religion in America
- Indigenous Religious Freedom
- Religion and Madness
- Peoples Temple and Jonestown
- Queering Religion
- Nonhuman Worlds (Scribner Seminar)
- Allies in Learning and Teaching
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- 鈥淧roject Allows Students to Contribute to History.鈥� Jonestown & Peoples Temple: A Digital Archive. October 19, 2026.
- 鈥溾�業f you don鈥檛 love children, you don鈥檛 understand socialism鈥�: The Children of Peoples
Temple.鈥� In
Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present, edited by Victoria Wolcott, 143-174. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2024.
- 鈥溾�楧riven Insane by Eddyism鈥�: Christian Science, Popular Psychopathology, and a Turn of the Century Contest over Faith and Madness鈥� Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 31, no. 3. December 2021.
- 鈥淪tirpiculture: Science-Guided Human Propagation and the Oneida Community.鈥� Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 52, no.1. (2017): 76-99.