Anca Wilkening is a Ph.D. candidate in the Study of Religion (North American Religions) with a secondary concentration in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. Anca studied theology at the Universities of Hamburg and Heidelberg in Germany before earning a Master of Arts in Religion degree with a focus on the History of Christianity from Yale Divinity School in 2019. 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, 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 racialized notions of whiteness 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. Anca’s work 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 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. Other recent community-engaged and public history projects include working with a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and community members at Harvard to plant and care for a Three-Sisters Garden, as well as conducting historical research with the Lowell Legacies Projects. As the project’s founding Senior Archivist, Anca worked with and guided a team of undergraduate students in investigating the complex legacies of the Lowell family, especially former Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, in upholding systems of oppression and injustice such as racism, homophobia, imperialism, antisemitism, and xenophobia at Harvard and beyond.