2017 Graduate Achievement Award recipient
“Slavery’s Holy Profits: Religion and Capitalism in the Antebellum Lower Mississippi Valley” is John’s dissertation exploring the relationship between capitalist markets, religious faith, and the institution of slavery in the antebellum Southwest.
“I am especially interested in the economic foundations of proslavery evangelical denominations, as well as white Southerners’ faith that God’s Providence guided markets and commercial networks in the slave-based cotton kingdom.”
He presented “Missionary Cotton: Saving Souls in Mississippi’s Cotton Kingdom” at the 2017 Southern Historical Association annual meeting and wrote his master’s thesis on Anti-Mission Baptists, Religious Liberty, and Local Church Autonomy.