Anthony Petro | American & New England Studies Program

Associate Professor of Religion and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Director of Graduate Studies in Religion, Director, Health Humanities Project

Anthony Petro is an associate professor in the Department of Religion and in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program and the NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor at Boston University. My teaching and research interests include religion and culture in the United States; religion, medicine, and public health; and gender and sexuality studies. My first book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015), examines the history of American religious responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis and their role in the promotion of ongoing forms of moral citizenship. I have published essays on a number of topics, including histories of Catholic sexual abuse, critical disability studies and religion, the religious politics of camp, and approaches to studying race, gender, and sexuality in North American religion.

I’m now writing a book called Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Sacred in the Modern United States (under contract with Oxford University Press), which traces heated debates over sex, art, race, and religion to reveal competing genealogies of the sacred and the secular in the modern U.S., especially during the heyday of the culture wars. It explores how a range of feminist and queer artists have engaged religious themes and ritual in their work, spanning from Judy Chicago’s 1979 The Dinner Party, to Ray Navarro’s role in ACT UP’s Stop the Church demonstration, to Renee Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper, to the controversy surrounding David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in the Belly as part of 2010’s “Hide/Seek” exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. Provoking Religion asks how this archive of visual and performance art helps us to rethink key categories in the study of religion and in gender and sexuality studies.

I spent the 2019-2020 academic year working on this project while in residence at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and currently run BU’s new Health Humanities Project.

Selected Publications

After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)

“Bob Flanagan’s Crip Catholicism, Transgression, and Form in Lived Religion,” American Religion 1:2 (Spring 2020): 1-26

“U.S. Religious History, the Culture Wars, and the Arts of Secularity,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87:4 (December 2019): 968-981

“Sex, Art, and Moral Panic,” Modern American History 1: 2 (July 2018), 237-241

“Ray Navarro’s Jesus Camp, AIDS Activist Video, and the ‘New Anti-Catholicism,’” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 85: 4 (December 2017): 920-956

“Disability Studies and Religion,” in Embodied Religion, edited by Kent Brintnall (Farmington Hills, Mich: MacMillan: 2016): 359-376

For a detailed academic bio and CV, please see Professor Petro’s Department Profile or academia page.