Sally M. Promey

Sally M. Promey (born February 22, 1953) is an American art historian. She worked in the faculty of Northwestern University and University of Maryland, College Park, where she was chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology, before becoming Caroline Washburn Professor of Religion and Visual Culture at Yale Divinity School. A 2002 elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and 2005 Guggenheim Fellow, she specializes in relations between American religion and art, and she has authored books like Spiritual Spectacles and Painting Religion in Public (1999) and edited volumes like The Visual Culture of American Religions (2001) and Sensational Religion (2014).

Biography Sally M. Promey was born on February 22, 1953, in Medina, Ohio, After attending Medina High School, she obtained her BA (1975) in art history and religious studies at Hiram College, her MDiv in the visual arts and religion (1978) at Yale Divinity School, and her PhD (1988) in cultural history at the University of Chicago;

After working as an art history lecturer at the Northwestern University Department of Art History since 1989, she moved to the University of Maryland, College Park Department of Art History and Archaeology in 1991, where she was promoted from assistant professor to associate professor in 1997 and full professor in 2000 and was chair from July 2005 until December 2006. She won the 2000 American Academy of Religion Book Award in Historical Studies for her next book Painting Religion in Public. In April 2002, she was elected to the American Antiquarian Society. In 2005, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. for "a study of the public display of religion in the United States"; this would later be used for her 2024 book Religion in Plain View. She also served as editor of the volumes The Visual Culture of American Religions (2001), American Religious Liberalism (2012), and Sensational Religion (2014), in the case of the first two as co-editor with David Morgan and Leigh Schmidt.