Biography
Samuel Stella studies the ways that religious differences are made, maintained, transgressed and subverted through the creation, discovery, and circulation of meaningful things. His recent dissertation, Borderland Miracles: The Assemblies of God Mexican Work, 1914-1928, argues that Pentecostal miracles like speaking in tongues were instrumental to the establishment of a border between Pentecostalism and an imagined Mexican Catholicism, as well as its transgression. Sam is also interested in how the work of Stanley Cavell can inform discourses of materiality, mediation, and belief in the study of religion, as well as the religious residues within contemporary psychotherapeutic culture.