Cara Burnidge
Associate Professor of Religion
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Cara Burnidge
Associate Professor of Religion
Ph.D., Religion, Florida State University
MA, Religion, Florida State University
I teach courses about religion in the United States, including a UNIFI General Education course about current religious demographics and trends and upper division courses related to the history of religions in America from colonial era to present.
My research explores the relationship between religion and politics in the United States. I’m interested in how religions shaped expressions of American democracy in the long nineteenth century. This includes scholarship related to religion and foreign policy, such as “Religious Influences on U.S. Foreign Policy” and “U.S. Foreign Relations and American Religious Liberalism,” two essays published with Oxford University Press. My scholarship also includes monographs about significant historical figures who shaped American democracy, like A Peaceful Conquest: Woodrow Wilson, Religion, and the New World Order (Chicago University Press, 2016) and, my current project, a religious biography of woman’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Most recently, I published an edited reference volume with historian Lauren Turek, The Routledge History of Religion and Politics in the United States Since 1775 (2025).