Professor Uta Balbier
Professor of Modern History
St Anne's College
My research focuses on the transnational history of the 20th century United States, particularly on how religion shaped, and was shaped by, America’s engagement with the world. Trained in European and North American history, I am fascinated by the relationship between politics and culture, the sacred and the profane, and the transnational interconnectivities of performances, practices, and beliefs in the 20th century.
Research Interests
- 20th Century US history
- Global history
- Religious history
My most recent monograph Altar Call in Europe: Billy Graham, Mass Evangelism, and the Cold-War West (Oxford University Press, 2021) challenges assumptions about a uniquely American relationship between politics, consumerism, and religion. By examining religious practices and performativity across the Atlantic, and how they have influenced each other, I argue against an exceptional American religious modernity.
During my work on the steering committees of the international network “A Global History of US Evangelicalism” and the AHRC-funded international network “Promise and Peril of America in the World”, I developed an increasing interest in the concepts of American Empire and soft-power. These themes frame my current research on the religious, political, and cultural encounters between British and US missionaries and Nigerian Christians at the time decolonisation and independence.
I served as Chair of HOTCUS, the Historians of the 20th Century United States in the UK, (2020-23) and I am currently a member of the Council of the American Society of Church History, and the Deputy Director of the RAI.
Publications
Altar Call in Europe: Billy Graham, Mass Evangelism, and the Cold-War West
Billy Graham's ministry is often described as a quintessentially American success story. However, by 1954 Billy Graham was bigger news in London than in Texas. Altar Call explores how Graham's encounters and perception in Europe shaped what was from the beginning on an international ministry. The revival meetings Graham held in London, Berlin, and New York in the 1950s provided lively fora for ministers, politicians, and ordinary Christians to imagine and experience the future of faith, the role of religion in the Cold War, and the intersections between faith and consumer culture in new ways.
DPhil Students
I am keen to hear from potential DPhil students interested in the religious histories of the 20th century United States and Europe; the global history of the United States; and the cultural history of the Cold War and US empire.