Writing
Book
Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850-1914 (Manchester University Press and New York University Press, 2019).
Academic Journal Articles
“ ‘The Curse of Race Prejudice’: Debates about Racial ‘Prejudice’ in the United States, c. 1750-1900.” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2021): pp. 25-46.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2021.1898812
“Defining and Redefining Atheism: Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries for ‘Atheism’ and Their Critics from the Early Modern Period to the Present,” Intellectual History Review, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2020): pp. 253-271.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2019.1642582
“Rethinking the Histories of Atheism, Unbelief, and Nonreligion: An Interdisciplinary Perspective,” Interdisciplinarity and Methodological Pluralism: The Practice of Intellectual History and Conceptual History, a special issue of Global Intellectual History (published online, 19 August 2019).
https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2019.1657640
“Unclasping the Eagle’s Talons: Mark Twain, American Freethought, and the Responses to Imperialism,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 17, No. 3, (2018): pp. 524-545.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781418000099
“Atheism and Polygenesis in the Nineteenth Century: Charles Bradlaugh’s Racial Anthropology,” Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 16, No. 3 (November 2019): pp. 835-861.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000622
“E.D. Morel (1873-1924), the Congo Reform Association, and the History of Human Rights,” Britain and the World, Vol. 9, No. 2, (September 2016): pp. 213-235.
https://doi.org/10.3366/brw.2016.0238
Contact me if you would like a PDF for any of these articles.
Book Chapters
“Histories of Atheism: Key Questions and Disputes,” in The Cambridge History of Atheism, eds. Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021): pp. 14-33.
Other Articles
The Weirdness of Being Secular
OnlySky (August 2022)
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Review of Joseph Blankholm, The Secular Paradox: On the Religiosity of the Not Religious (NYU Press, 2022)
Trust Us: The Problem with Crypto-Billionaires and Effective Altruism
OnlySky (July 2022)
Secularism and the Limits of Progress?
The Freethinker (June 2022)
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Review of Patrick Corbeil, Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement: Imagining a Secular World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)
How God Was Wedged into Secular Canada’s Constitution
OnlySky (May 2022)
How Three Media Revolutions Transformed the History of Atheism
The Freethinker (April 2022)
The Cannibal Club: The Intellectual Dark Web of the 19th Century (subscription required)
Arc Digital (August 2021)
Reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in the Age of "Cancel Culture" and "Fake News"
Liberal Currents (March 2021)
Nonreligious Americans: The Key Demographic That No One is Talking About (with Todd Tavares)
The Humanist (January 2021)
Arc Digital (November 2020)
When Racists Called Themselves “Racists”
Arc Digital (September 2020)
New Atheism and Me: Personal Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Movement
Medium (August 2020)
A History of the Word “Atheism” and the Politics of Dictionaries
Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network Blog (January 2020)
Moncure Conway, Freethought, and Race in the Nineteenth Century
Ethical Record (Winter 2019): 10-12
Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850-1914 – An Introduction
Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network Blog (August 2019)
Atheism, Race, and the Freethinker at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
The Freethinker (July 2019)
Towards a History of the Term “Racism”
Monitor: Global Intelligence on Racism (May 2019)
An Atheist With a Tall Hat On: The Forgotten History of Agnosticism
The Humanist (February 2019)
* French translation by Michel Virard, “L’histoire oubliée de l’agnosticisme : un agnostique est-il un athée avec un chapeau haut-de-forme ?,” Le Québec Humaniste, vol 14, no 2 (2019): 1-3.
Mark Twain, Freethought, and Anti-Imperialism
The Truth Seeker (September-December 2018): 8-15 (password: irreverent)
Freethinkers and the Fight Against Racism
The Truth Seeker (January-April 2018): 30-36
Exploring the Deep Roots of Scottish Secularism
CommonSpace (March 2016)
The Terms of Unbelief: An Atheist By Any Other Name
The GC Advocate, CUNY Graduate Centre newspaper (February 2015)
Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network Blog (May 2014)
Book Reviews
Review of Christopher Grasso, Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) in American Religion, Vol. 2, no. 1 (2020): 189-91.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/amerreli.2.1.19
Review of Paul Harvey, Christianity and Race in the American South: A History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), Global Intellectual History, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2019): 90-92.
https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2018.1432141
“Atheism: Whence and Whither?” (Review Essay), History of European Ideas, Vol. 43, No. 6 (2017): pp. 691-697.
(Review of Stephen LeDrew, The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Nick Spencer, Atheists: The Origin of the Species (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); and Mitchell Stephens, Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).)
https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2016.1209364