Anca Wilkening

Anca Wilkening is a Ph.D. candidate with a primary concentration in the Study of Religion (North American Religions) with a secondary concentration in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests bridge the Study of Religion with Queer Theory, Indigenous and Colonialism Studies, and Early American and Atlantic History, with a particular focus on the intersections of religion, intimacy, and kin-making. She is a 2024-25 Dissertation Fellow for the Loeb Religious Freedom Initiative and a co-convener of the Early and Native American History Seminar (ENAH) at Harvard. Anca’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, among others.

Anca’s dissertation project, an interdisciplinary study of the eighteenth-century American Northeast, examines the intersections of religious practice with the formation of kinship and intimate relations among a diverse group of Mohican, Lenape, European settler, and African actors in Pietist communities. Her research draws from multilingual archives, built environments, material cultures, and community-engaged methodologies. By denaturalizing not only the categories of gender, sex, and race but also elucidating the instability of kinship categories, Anca’s project shows how early Pietists challenged both Indigenous and settler kin systems and, in some cases, created space for queer constructions of family, gender, intimacy, and domesticity within complex colonial relationships of power. Throughout, she argues that kinship and intimacy form a framework for the study of religion that allows for intercultural comparison and relationality without essentializing or losing sight of epistemological differences among cultures and the diversity of relational arrangements between individuals, communities, land, and space.

Other research projects include work on the intersection of racialization and gender with notions of whiteness, ethnicity, and settler colonial memory work in nineteenth-century American religion; the material and spatial entanglements of queer and trans identity formation in Pietist communities;  and enslavement and anti-slavery discourse among early American radical religious actors. In her role of founding Senior Archivist of the Lowell Legacies Projects at Harvard, Anca worked with and guided a team of undergraduate students in investigating the complex legacies of the Lowell family. Her students and Anca explored how especially former Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell was complicit in upholding systems of oppression and injustice at Harvard and beyond, including the history of the Secret Court which targeted and dismissed queer students at Harvard. The Lowell Legacies team also explores queerness in the work and life of poet and philanthropist Amy Lowell, the sister of President Lowell.

Anca’s research and theorizing are committed to the ethics, methodologies, and ongoing learning of community-engaged research as a non-Indigenous scholar on Native land. In her collaborations with Indigenous community members and leaders, she examines how research, particularly archival work, may be conducted in good relation with sovereign Indigenous nations and in service of and solidarity with their futures and cultural revitalization efforts. For instance, she is currently collaborating with knowledge and language keepers from two Munsee First Nations in Ontario to (re)connect with language and ancestral teachings recorded in early Moravian manuscripts.

Anca is planning on entering the academic job market in 2025.