Abram Van Engen
Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities, Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics
Most of my scholarship focuses on early American literature, especially seventeenth-century Puritans and their cultural memories and legacies, but my writings explore religion and literature across topics and periods.
Abram Van Engen is the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and begins his tenure as Director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics on July 1, 2025. He is past chair of the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Professor Van Engen specializes in early American religion, literature, and culture, focusing on Puritanism, poetry, sentimentalism, and the history of emotion. His first book, Sympathetic Puritans, a history of sympathy in Calvinist thought, was published in spring 2015 with Oxford University Press. City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism was published in 2020 with Yale University Press and draws religion and politics together in a biography of the 1630 Puritan sermon that modern politicians cite when they refer to America as a “city on a hill.” That research led to a class for the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics studying the history of American exceptionalism from Winthrop to Obama and Trump. His most recent book is Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church (Eerdmans 2024), inspired by his podcast Poetry For All.
Van Engen’s work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, and it has been supported by several national fellowships, honors, and awards. He earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University.
