David Morgan is a Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Duke University with an additional appointment in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke. His Ph.D. (University of Chicago, 1990) was in modern European art history. He became interested in American religious history and popular imagery and has published extensively in this area: including Visual Piety (1998), Protestants and Pictures (1999), and The Lure of Images (2007). In more recent years, he has studied Catholic visual history, resulting in The Sacred Heart of Jesus: The Visual Evolution of a Devotion (2008) and The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity (2015), which was the 2012 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, UK. Over the last several years, the focus of his work has been religious material culture, which informed a volume he edited, Religious Material Culture: The Matter of Belief (2010), and two recent volumes: Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (2018) and The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions (2021). Morgan was a founding editor of Material Religion, a scholarly journal now in its fifteenth year of publication.
David Morgan
