Shared Interests Lead to a Research Collaboration…
Both James Bielo and Heidi Campbell have been collecting secondhand religious materials for several years, as part of their individual research into American religious cultures. Each has assembled broad collections that highlight diverse religious identities, and practices in the geographic regions they have been situated.
While these projects started independently, Bielo and Campbell connected online in 2022 after seeing images of each other’s collections on social media. Through this, they began a dialogue about their intersecting research interests leading to this collaboration.
Dr James S Bielo
Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Northwestern University
Dr Bielo is the author of five books, most recently Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place (Bloomsbury, 2021
Dr Bielo has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork on the secondhand circulation of Christian material culture since July 2021. His current research on secondhand religion is based in SW Connecticut.
Bielo’s collection began in 2020, focusing on Christian traditions and includes materials representing Black Church denominations, Eastern Orthodoxy, evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants, charismatic Christians, Roman Catholics, Latter-Day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and utopian communities. He has collected items from the Midwest, the greater Chicago area and now the Northeast Coast of America. His special interest is in the people who sell and sources secondhand religious devotional objects.
Dr Heidi A Campbell
Professor of Communication and Affiliate Faculty in Religious Studies at Texas A&M University
Dr Campbell has been studying the way religion appears in Texas thrift store culture since early 2022, and investigating the stories and beliefs prominent religious objects found communicate about individuals’ everyday theology and public performance of faith in the region.
Campbell’s collection began in 2021 and focuses on how religion is represented in Texas through thrift store culture and artifacts. Her collection primarily represents Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and New Age religions. Her attention is drawn to what types of religious items turn up in thrift stores and what this says about religiosity in Texas.
