Kendall Marchman is an Assistant Professor of Religion, and has been with the Religion Department since 2018. His primary research considers the development of Pure Land Buddhist practice and belief in China during the Tang Dynasty. Additionally, he has researched and published on religious tourism in Asia. He teaches a wide range of classes surveying the religions of Asia. 

Dr. Marchman welcomes inquiries and applications from prospective graduate students pursuing an M.A.. Prospective PhD students are welcome to contact Dr. Marchman, but he is not accepting PhD students for the upcoming year. 

I am a cultural and historical anthropologist of religion, and I am especially interested in the many histories, cultural practices, and social effects of Christianity in the world. My work uses lenses from feminist theory and material religion to trace the interplay of gendered bodies, spaces, and words in particular social situations.

My first book, Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850-1890 (Brill, 2013), examines how place-making practices on and around new "mission stations" shaped understandings of Protestant Christianity, gender, and race in colonial Southern Africa. 

My second book, Life in Language: Mission Feminists and the Emergence of a New Protestant Subject is part of the series "Class 200: New Studies in Religion" (Chicago, 2025). It explores the often problematic connection between "women" and "words" in Christianity. I focus on a case study of the so-called "mission feminists" in early-twentieth-century Norway - a group of women who used new language practices (new ways of speaking, listening, reading, and writing) to advocate for women's greater status in Protestant organizations. Their linguistic experiments combined their words and their bodies in different material-discursive configurations. While scholars often argue that Protestantism drives toward dematerialization, aiming to separate language from materiality, the mission feminists show us the opposite: they give us a glimpse into the material-discursive multiplicity of Protestant modern subjects.

My current book project is a theoretical introduction to concepts from feminist new materialism and related conversations that can help us better understand the unusual, complicated relations that have developed between subjects and objects in Protestant Christianity, with the working title New Keywords for the Study of Protestantism.  

My publications are available at: ingiehovland.net/publications