Special Issue Introduction: Religion and Material Texts in the Americas

This special issue offers a capacious sample of scholarship on religion and material texts in the Americas, and seeks to reveal the potential of material-texts approaches for the study of religion. It features articles by four early-career Americanists (Emily Floyd, Alexandra Kaloyanides, Roxanne Korpan, and Martin Tsang) whose research bridges both areas. Because material texts research typically relies on archives for its source base, I asked the authors of the "In Conversation" essays (Matthew P. Brown, Steffi Dippold, Kyle Roberts, and Judith Weisenfeld) to discuss what they see as the challenges and opportunities confronting archival research in material texts today. While the collected eight pieces reflect the diversity and originality of their authors, they make several collective contributions. They demonstrate how material texts mediate power, especially amid encounters involving state, colonial, and missionary actors; exemplify the strength of interpretations informed by hands-on encounters with material texts; display a critical alertness to the structures through which material texts have been collected and made legible to researchers today; and show what we stand to gain from collaborative scholarship