The Divinity School will host a public lecture, Creating Contemporary Christians: Media, Marketing, and the Business of American Revivalism. Dr. Leah Louise Payne, Assistant Professor of American Religious History at Portland Seminary, Portland, Oregon will be the speaker.

About the Speaker

Dr. Leah Payne (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University, 2013) is associate professor of American religious history at Portland Seminary and a 2023–2024 Public Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI). Her research traces the ascent of Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in the United States and abroad. Payne's first book, Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), won the Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 2016 Book Award. Her second book, God Gave Rock & Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024), shows how contemporary Christian music shaped evangelicalism in America and beyond. 

Payne has published research exploring transnational Pentecostal and Charismatic movements in journals such as Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Political Theology, and The Journal of Ritual Studies. Payne’s public-facing work has appeared in The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today, and she co-hosts Rock That Doesn’t Roll: The Story of Christian Rock, a John Templeton Foundation-funded Public Radio Exchange (PRX) podcast that explores the profound effect CCM had on the 1990s and early aughts American public life and evangelicalism in the United States.