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. Her research interests bridge the Study of Religion with Queer Theory, Indigenous and Colonialism Studies, and Early American and Atlantic History, with a special concern for the intersections of religion, intimacy, and kin-making. She is a 2023-24 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellow and a co-organizer of the Early and Native American History Seminar (ENAH) at Harvard.

Anca is currently writing a dissertation tentatively entitled “Red Sisters, Womanly Fathers, and Queer Domesticities: Radical Pietism, Kinship, and Intimacy in Lenape and Mohican Homelands.” Drawing from multilingual archives, built environments, material cultures, and community-engaged methodologies, this interdisciplinary study of the eighteenth-century American Northeast interrogates the intersections of religious practice with formations of kinship and intimate relations among a diverse set of Indigenous, European, and African actors in Pietist communities. 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, made space for queer constructions of family, gender, intimacy, and domesticity within complex colonial relationships of power. Throughout, the project argues that kinship and intimacy form a framework for the study of religion that allows for intercultural comparison and relationality without essentializing and losing sight of epistemological differences among cultures and the diversity of relational arrangements between individual, community, land, and space.

Anca’s other research projects include 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, as well as enslavement and anti-slavery discourse among early American radical religious actors. She is also interested in the ethics and methodologies of community-engaged research as a non-Indigenous scholar on Native land and how research, specifically archival work, may be conducted in good relation with Indigenous nations and in service of and solidarity with their futures and cultural revitalization efforts.

At Harvard, Anca also works as a Residential Tutor and Member of the Committee for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at Lowell House. She curates an intersectional DEIB library focused on activism, identity, and student belonging in the House. Since the fall of 2023 Anca holds the position of Senior Archivist for the Lowell Legacies Project in which she guides and works with a team of undergraduate assistant researchers to investigate the complex legacies of the Lowell family in upholding systems of oppression, especially regarding racism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

Anca’s research has been supported by grants and research funding from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, among others. 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.