Sonia Hazard (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)

Sonia Hazard focuses on religions in early national and antebellum US history; media, material texts, and the history of the book and printing; material, visual, and sensory culture; and theory and method, especially new materialisms. Her first book, Empire of Print: Evangelical Power in an Age of Mass Media, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press (2025). Focusing on the goliath publisher the American Tract Society, the book bridges methods from book history, STS, and new materialisms to provide a media infrastructuralist account of the expansion of evangelical power over the territory of the early American nation.

Questions about media and its consequences in the context of US empire continue to inform her current book project, Christianity and the Book in the Cherokee Diaspora, 1821–1861, which parses how the material qualities, meanings, and uses of print in the Cherokee language changed over time and across the ruptures of removal. Her first article from this body of work, “The Politics of Media Format: Printing Poor Sarah During the Removal Crisis in Cherokee Nation” (Church History, 2022) won the Bowers Award for best article in textual scholarship and the Religious Communication Association’s article of the year award.

Selected Publications

• Hazard, Sonia. “The Politics of Media Format: Printing Poor Sarah During the Removal Crisis in Cherokee Nation.” Church History 91, no. 4 (2022): 824–63.
• Hazard, Sonia. “How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism.” Religion and American Culture 31, no. 2 (2021): 137–92.
• Hazard, Sonia. “Evangelical Encounters: The American Tract Society and the Rituals of Print Distribution in Antebellum America.” The Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 1 (2020): 200–34.
• Hazard, Sonia. “The American Tract Society and the Refinement of the Evangelical Book, 1825–1861.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 114, no. 2 (2020): 127–94.
• Hazard, Sonia. “Two Ways of Thinking About New Materialism.” Material Religion 15, no. 5 (2019): 629–31.