​Member Spotlight: Kelly Kaelin, Winner of Women's Caucus Intersectional Prize
Interviewed by Nicole Mansfield Wright

For the next segment of Member Spotlight, I’m catching up with previous Caucus prizewinners.

Dr. Kelly Kaelin won the Women’s Caucus Intersectional Prize in 2023 for her project Convert,
Migrant, Missionary: Religion, Gender, and Race in the Early Modern Caribbean. She’s now an
Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern Indiana—and a new mom, to boot.




​1.  How did you come to focus on race and religion in eighteenth-century contexts?

A. The religion focus came first. I began graduate school as a scholar of the
Reformation in the 16 th  century, but gradually felt the pull later as other
interests – like transatlantic Christianity and empire – emerged. The focus
on race almost happened by accident and is something I’m still becoming
comfortable with. I started my project on the Moravians, firmly focused
on how the Church enabled European women’s migration and travel. It
wasn’t until much later in the project that I realized the depth of
documentation and ability to study Moravian mission work [involving]
enslaved women.

2.  How did you learn of the Women's Caucus award/what motivated you to
apply?

A. I learned of the award through the Caucus’s website as I was trying to
cobble together grants to fund a summer research trip. The intersectional
focus of the award fit so well with my own research on religion, gender,
and race that it seemed a wonderful opportunity to have my project
proposal read by experts in the field.

3.  Comment on at least one way the award has influenced your career
opportunities or trajectory—or simply on how you approach your work? 

A. The process of writing [for] the award actually helped me articulate
exactly how I see my work as intersectional and helped me define myself
as a scholar of race. I always find that writing grant proposals is an
important process of refining the project – it helps me get out of my own
head and phrase the argument in a way that people who haven’t been up to
their eyeballs in the archive can understand. That’s actually why I really
enjoy grant writing – like teaching, it is a process of articulating
the why of a project to a broader audience.

4. Who are some of the scholars/what are some of the books/articles that have
been most influential for your intersectional focus on race and religion?

A. Katherine Gerbner’s work on Protestant supremacy and slavery in the
eighteenth-century Atlantic world (Christian Slavery) as well as Michael
Dickinson’s work on social death and enslaved community (Almost Dead).
Both of these have helped me to rethink religion, mission, and
enslavement to transition from thinking of enslaved congregants as objects
rather than subjects. When I started thinking of these women as defining
their own religious practice and creating their own community within the
movement, something clicked.

5. How have recent events—e.g., the pandemic, political developments,
technological advances, and/or shifts in higher education--changed your research
agenda? 

A. This book is a product of the pandemic and my turn towards the Caribbean
would not have occurred without the pandemic. I was writing a
dissertation on women’s Atlantic migration when the pandemic hit. I had
just been awarded a Fulbright and thought I would be leaving in
September 2020 to conduct long-term archival research in eastern Saxony.
However, travel restrictions meant that was postponed nearly a year, but
the requirements of a Ph.D. program meant that research couldn’t wait.
Instead of using those archives, which aren’t digitized, I started exploring
digitized projects out of the Moravian Church Archive in Pennsylvania
and the digital history project Moravian Lives. Since 2019, those archives
have put their energy towards digitizing the records of the West Indies
missions, as those documents were previously restricted due to their
fragile condition. So, in 2020, I was reading newly digitized records of the
West Indies rather than the more European-focused documents in Saxony.
Who knows, maybe without Covid, I would’ve written a book on
migration in eastern Europe or something entirely different! You have to
go where the documents lead you.

6. Which tech tools are you currently using/which were useful in the course of
your award-winning project, and why? 

A. Digitized archival sources that allow me to really zoom in on the
small and cramped handwriting. Otherwise, I’m fairly low-tech. I
use a lot of Google Docs and Zotero, but that’s about it.

7.  What more can be done to support women in ASECS—anything you hope the
Caucus in particular can address?

A. I became a mother in August, so my brain is really attuned to helping
women with young children. I’d love to see grants/awards open their
funding options to financing childcare, even for at-home “writing
retreats.” At the conference, advocating for designated lactation/pumping
spaces that aren’t the bathroom.

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