Ethnographers who study the living are accustomed to going “on location,” but those of us who study the dead find ourselves in research-relevant places, too. Historians have many options for visiting historical sites with enduring and widely-acknowledged relevance to our work: churches, synagogues, traditionally sacred lands that are still intact, still in use or set aside as revered historical sites; places where our subjects lived and died; sites of the events that we study, tragic or just monumental. Known places are one thing, but we often also, however, find ourselves drawn to visit empty places that we—and possibly only we—know were once special to some subject, or some group, or some moment. What is interesting about these spaces—forgotten, destroyed, or never actually known except through our work—is that we as scholars are responsible for projecting our knowledge onto them, something that (especially when one studies religion) can seem both necessary and uncomfortably close to the sort of sacralizing of our subjects that we usually take pains to avoid in our work. This project will offer some meditations on visits to such places from scholars of American religious history.

The Fields section has been organized around the theme of “Empty Places” all academic year. In the Spring of 2020 this has taken on a different significance. We would love to have your brief reflections on the empty places of American Religion you’re encountering or thinking about in this moment, ideally accompanied by a photo. We’ll curate these into periodic dispatches from the field.