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Biography

Dr. Marie Olson Purcell is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Religious Studies. Her scholarship explores how religion, gender, and politics shape identity and community in the United States. She is especially interested in how people express and perform their religious belonging—through practices, values, and connections to that which is deemed sacred and one another. Her teaching and research highlight how values can both unite and divide, showing how religious life influences the ways people understand themselves and others.

Her current book project, with University of North Carolina Press, is an ethnography of women’s religious identity formation at the nationally prominent and politically conservative First Baptist Dallas. The book considers complex paradigms of marginalization by using feminist frameworks to study nonfeminist subjects and uses a theory of religious performativity to advance understanding across difference. The study crosses disparate worldviews with the aim of contributing to the slow work of depolarization that ultimately aids pursuits in social justice, democracy, and community.

Her training includes theories and methods of comparative religion, social scientific theory, and methods in the study of religion with attention to historical methodologies and contemporary critical theory, with an emphasis on American religion and politics, specifically Christianity, and women and gender studies. She also has almost a decade of experience as a practitioner, facilitator, and teacher in constructive dialogue methods, which inform her research and pedagogy.

As a teacher in higher education, she strives to provide student-centered learning environment focused on cultivating intellectual curiosity across diverse worldviews and equipping students for constructive dialogue and compassionately critical understanding in an increasingly polarized nation and world.

In addition to her work at Ë®¶à¶àµ¼º½, Dr. Olson Purcell is also a member of the regional board for the American Academy of Religion—Southwest.

Courses Taught

• Religious Literacy
• Christian Theology
• Christianity and American Public Life

Selected Publications

Purcell, Marie Olson. “Bodies That Matter to God: A Feminist Theory of Religious Performativity Applied to the #SilenceIsNotSpiritual Movement.” 5.2 (2022).

Purcell, Marie Olson. “‘Oh, Those Words Are so Divisive, Pastor!’: Christian Nationalism and Identity Expression in the United States.” Word and World: Theology for Christian Ministry 43, no. 2 (2023): 138–45.

Purcell, Marie Olson. “‘I Am Completely Confident in the Authority of God’s Word’: Intersecting and Approbatory Identities at First Baptist Dallas.” Religion: Religionslaererforeningen [Journal for Teachers of Religion in Gymnasium]. 4 (2023): 21–29.