Abram Van Engen

 
 
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STANLEY ELKIN PROFESSOR IN THE HUMANITIES AND DIRECTOR OF THE JOHN C. DANFORTH CENTER ON RELIGION AND POLITICS

Abram Van Engen is the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. His research, writing, and teaching focus on religion and literature, especially early American culture. Van Engen’s first book, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England (Oxford University Press, 2015) explored the broad role of sympathy in Puritan theology and its ramifications in early American literature. His second book, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2020), studies collective memory, nationalism, history, religion, and politics to explain how the Pilgrims and Puritans have been remembered, remade, and re-used in American culture.

More recently, Van Engen’s work involves the teaching of poetry to general audiences, especially through a popular podcast he co-hosts called Poetry For All. Building on that podcast and turning to the church, Van Engen wrote Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church (Eerdmans, 2024), which explains how and why to read poetry through the language of faith. Word Made Fresh was named the 2024 Best Book in Culture, Poetry, and the Arts by Christianity Today. His most recent co-edited book, Anne Bradstreet Now: Modern Poets Respond (Oxford 2026), combines his study of the Puritans with his love of poetry.

Beyond these books, Van Engen’s work has appeared in multiple journals and online at Salon.com, The Conversation, Avidly, Religion and Politics, The Washington Post, and other venues. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Walter Muir Whitehill Prize in Early American History, the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize, the Pelikan Book Award, a faculty fellowship and a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other awards.

He and his wife, Kristin Van Engen (also faculty at Washington University in St. Louis), attend The Church of St. Michael and St. George. They have three children, Simon, Grace, and Hendrik.

Contact Abram Van Engen here.

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