About

Anthony Petro (Ph.D., Religion, Princeton University) is an associate professor in the Department of Religion and in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University. My teaching and research interests include religion and culture in the United States; religion and visual culture; religion, medicine, and public health; and gender and sexuality studies. My first book, *After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion* (Oxford, 2015), investigates the history of U.S. American religious responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis and their role in the promotion of a national moral discourse on sex. I have published essays on a number of topics, including histories of Catholic sexual abuse, critical disability studies and religion, the religious politics of camp, and approaches to studying race, gender, and sexuality in North American religion.

I am currently working on a book called *Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Sacred in the Modern United States* (under contract with Oxford), which traces heated debates over sex, art, and religion to reveal competing genealogies of the sacred and the secular in the modern U.S., especially during the heyday of the culture wars. It also explores how a range of feminist and queer artists have engaged religious themes and rituals in their work, spanning from Judy Chicago’s 1979 “The Dinner Party” to the controversy surrounding David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in the Belly” as part of 2010’s “Hide/Seek” exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. Provoking Religion examines how this archive of visual and performance art helps us to rethink key categories in the study of religion and in gender and sexuality studies.