Colleen McDannell

Colleen McDannell (born November 28, 1954) is an American historian of religion. A 2000 Guggenheim Fellow, she is author of The Christian Home in Victorian America: 1840‑1900, Heaven: A History (1988), Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (2004), and The Spirit of Vatican II (2011), and she won the Organization of American Historians' 2019 Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women's and/or Gender History for her book Sister Saints: Mormon Women since the End of Polygamy. She is Professor of History and Sterling M. McMurrin Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Utah. All three degrees were in religious studies.

In 1989, McDannell received an honorable mention from the Catholic Press Association for her U.S. Catholic Historian article "The Devil Was the First Protestant': Gender and Intolerance in Irish Catholic Fiction". she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship "for a study of religious America in government photography, 1935-1943". At UU, she teaches several courses related to religious studies.

McDannell was a 1991 Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism Fellow at Notre Dame University and a 1992 Indo-American Fellow at the Council for International Education. and in 2000 at the University of Groningen. She was the 2000 John Adams Chair in American History at the University of Groningen, the 2003 Dickinson Distinguished Visitor at Dartmouth College, and the 2004 Walter Capps Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Works The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (1986) (with Bernhard Lang) Heaven: A History (1988) Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (1995) (ed.) Religions of the United States in Practice (2001) Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (2004) (ed.) Catholics in the Movies (2008) The Spirit of Vatican II: A History of Catholic Reform in America (2011) Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy (2019)