Dr. Liane Carlson has worked at Princeton University from 2015 until the present as the Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Religion. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion at Columbia University in 2015, where she also received her M.A. (2010) and M.Phil (2012) after graduating summa cum laude from Washington and Lee University (2007).

Liane has written on a number of topics for a public audience, drawing on her interests in ethics, the role Christianity in the modern world, and the history of Western philosophy. Recent pieces cover topics ranging from climate change and secularization, to the cultural significance of witchcraft, to the lasting influence of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible on #MeToo conversations, among others. For 2018-2019 she will be working on a new book tentatively titled Against Forgiveness, which explores the dangers and difficulties of forgiving too readily in a culture that often uses forgiveness as an excuse to sweep aside widespread, ongoing injustices.

Her academic research interests include the philosophical and theological history of Critical Theory, with particular emphasis on theories of religion, the limits of the critical power of history, embodiment, evil, and the intersection of religion and literature. Her first book, Losing Touch: Contingency and the Critical Limits of History, explores how 19th and 20th-century literary, scientific, anthropological and theological debates shaped a philosophical tradition that understood touch, rather than chance events, as the most primal way of experiencing contingency. The book is under contract at Columbia University Press. She also has articles forthcoming in Journal of Religion and Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.

In pursuing her research, Liane has been supported by a Fulbright Grant, a Jacob K. Javits Doctoral Fellowship, an AAUW American Dissertation Fellowship, a Mellon Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, a Public Humanities Fellowship from the New York Council for the Humanities, and a Stewart Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton University.

She currently lives in New York City with an embarrassingly friendly pit bull named Faraday, who will happily show you her tummy if you make eye contact with her.