Maura Jane Farrelly

Associate Professor of American Studies

Departments/Programs

American Studies
Journalism

Degrees

Emory University, Ph.D.
Emory University, M.A.
Fordham University, B.A.

Expertise

Religion in America
American Journalism
Colonial and Early America

Profile

Please visit my new faculty profile page.

Maura Jane Farrelly is associate professor and chair of American Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Emory University, with an emphasis on religion and the colonial and early-American periods.

Farrelly is the author of "Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity" (Oxford University Press, 2012) and "Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860" (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Her current research project is entitled "Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy and the Closing of the American Frontier." It uses the lives of three people in Wyoming at the turn of the 20th century to explore a topic that touches the lives of many Americans today -- the right to be forgotten.

Before joining the faculty at Brandeis, Farrelly worked as a full-time reporter, first for Georgia Public Radio in Atlanta and then for the Voice of America in Washington, D.C., and New York.

Farrelly has also freelanced for National Public Radio, Public Radio International and the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Her scholarly research and publications have focused on Catholicism and Methodism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Specific issues of interest have included the role of religion in the shaping of American identity, the relationship between religious asceticism and American understandings of freedom, and the origins and development of religious "relativism" in America.

Courses Taught

AMST	50b	Religion in American Life
AMST	100a	Foundations of American Culture
AMST	100b	Twentieth-Century American Culture
AMST	103b	Advertising and the Media
JOUR	120a	The Culture of Journalism