Hannah Thorpe

Graduate Student

Hannah entered the Ph.D program at Vanderbilt in 2022. She previously completed a bachelor's degree majoring in both Psychology and Religious Studies at Elon University, where she completed a project entitled “‘Strangers in a Strange Land:’ Jewish Responses to White Nationalism During the Trump Era,” which can be found in the Journal for Interreligious Studies. Hannah moved on to receive a Masters in Theological Studies, with a concentration in Modern Religious Thought and Experience, from Emory University. Her thesis included archival work on the women’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. 

At Vanderbilt, she is working on developing an ethnographic approach to studying Christian Nationalism in Tennessee, focusing especially on gender and sexual politics. Her approach engages spatial and historical lenses in the study of white supremacy in the United States, and includes theoretical understandings of discursive violence and slow violence.

She hopes her work contributes to ongoing scholarship on systemic racism in the United States. In connecting discursive formations to material world, Hannah seeks to expose the ways in which speech acts, political activism, and religious practice can manifest materially and structurally, upholding white supremacist inequalities. Her research is tied to her commitments of a more just and liberative future.