Gabriel Raeburn

Gabriel Raeburn is a Ph.D. candidate in Religious Studies and History, working at the intersection of religion and politics, and the histories of race, inequality, and evangelicalism in the United States throughout the twentieth century.

His dissertation explores the Prosperity Gospel’s origins and its impact on American culture and politics. In contrast to scholarship on the Religious Right that centers middle-class evangelicals and organizations located on the East and West coasts, Raeburn’s dissertation reorients focus to Pentecostals located in Oklahoma and the surrounding region. He traces Pentecostal institution building across the postwar period, from tent revivals to media empires, to demonstrate how Pentecostals moved from the periphery to the center of evangelicalism. His research brings together political history, material culture, lived religion, and public policy to show how an array of state, religious, and private sector influences constructed the Prosperity Gospel, as well how ideas of race and inequality were critical to its development.

Raeburn also works on the history of radical historians in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s, particularly Eugene D. Genovese. He recently published an article on Genovese and the radical journal Marxist Perspectives in Modern Intellectual History.

Committee: Anthea Butler (advisor), Sarah Barringer Gordon, Brent Cebul, Kevin M. Kruse (Princeton University)