Meet the Faculty

Joshua Paddison

• Visiting Assistant Professor, American Studies Program and Department of Religious Studies

Education

• Ph.D., UCLA, 2008
  

Contact Information

Background

• Ph.D., History, UCLA, 2008
• M.A., History, San Francisco State University, 2001
• B.A., Journalism, University of Oregon, 1996

My research focuses on comparative race and ethnicity, religion, and culture in the nineteenth-century United States, especially in the American West. My book "American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California," will be published by the University of California Press / Huntington Library's Western Histories series. The book examines contestations over the place of Native Americans and Chinese Americans from the Civil War to the 1890s, demonstrating the centrality of religion in racial formation and the importance of California in the story of Reconstruction. I am currently at work on a new book project, "Unholy Sensations: Sex, Religion, and Scandal in the
Gilded Age," which explores public fascination and anxiety surrounding "depraved" sexuality in late-nineteenth-century San Francisco.

Research Interests

• Comparative race and ethnicity
• Nineteenth-century U.S. religion and culture
• The American West

Publication Highlights

American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California, under contract with University of California Press / Huntington Library, Western Histories series.

"'Woman Is Everywhere the Purifer': The Politics of Temperance, 1878-1900," in California Women and Politics: From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 59-76.

"Anti-Catholicism and Race in Post-Civil-War San Francisco," Pacific Historical Review 78 (Fall 2009): 505-44.

Editor, A World Transformed: Firsthand Accounts of California before the Gold Rush (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1999).