Peter Manseau is an American writer, religion scholar and museum curator. He is Lilly Endowment Curator of American Religious History at the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian.
Early life
Manseau attended college at the
University of Massachusetts
The University of Massachusetts is the five-campus public university system and the only public research system in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The university system includes five campuses (Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, Lowell, and a medical ...
, then earned his master's degree and doctorate from
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private university, private research university in the Georgetown (Washington, D.C.), Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded by Bishop John Carroll (archbishop of Baltimore), John Carroll in 1789 as Georg ...
.
Career
Writing in ''
The National Interest
''The National Interest'' (''TNI'') is an American bimonthly international relations magazine edited by American journalist Jacob Heilbrunn and published by the Center for the National Interest, a public policy think tank based in Washington, ...
'', Ivan Plis describes Manseau as an "unusual man for the job" at National Museum of American History, contrasting Manseau's webzine ''Killing the Buddha'', a self-described “religion magazine for people made anxious by churches,” and what Plis describes as Manseau's attraction "to the bizarre and sometimes discomforting ways in which religion makes us behave", with the museum's "musty reputation as 'America’s attic.'” Manseau's 2017 illustrated collection ''Objects of Devotion: Religion in Early America'', which accompanied the museum's first religion-oriented exhibit, received a starred review from ''Publishers Weekly'', which called the book "a wonderful, inspiring collection."
Manseau wrote a memoir entitled ''Vows'', about his mother, a former Catholic nun, and father, a former Catholic priest.
In 2008 Manseau won the
National Jewish Book Award
The Jewish Book Council (Hebrew: ), founded in 1944, is an organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature.Sophie Brody Award for his debut novel, ''Songs for the Butcher's Daughter''. Speaking about the novel, in which
Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...
features significantly, Manseau told ''
The New Yorker
''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...
'', "Though most of my writing is about religion in one way or another, that’s my real interest: language—the ways in which religious identities are shaped by the languages we use to talk about them."
Bibliography
*''Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible'', coauthored with Jeff Sharlet. 2004 Free Press
*''Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son'', 2005 Free Press
*''Songs for the Butcher's Daughter: A Novel'', 2008 Free Press
*''Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith,'' 2009 Beacon Press. Co-edited with Jeff Sharlet.
*''Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead'', 2009 Henry Holt and Company
*''One Nation Under Gods: A New American History'', 2015
Little, Brown and Company
Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown in Boston. For close to two centuries it has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Early lists featured Emily ...
*''Melancholy Accidents: Three Centuries of Stray Bullets and Bad Luck'', 2016
Melville House Publishing
Melville House Publishing is an American independent publisher of literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The company was founded in 2001 and is run by the husband-and-wife team of Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians in Hoboken, New Jersey. T ...
*''Objects of Devotion: Religion in Early America'', 2017
Smithsonian Books
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Found ...
*''The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost'', 2017 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
*''The Jefferson Bible: A Biography'', 2020
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large.
The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financia ...
*''The Maiden of All Our Desires: A Novel'', 2022
Arcade Publishing
Arcade Publishing is an independent trade publishing company that started in 1988 in New York, USA. It publishes American and world fiction and nonfiction.
The company was started and run by Richard Seaver and his wife Jeannette.Weber, Bruce (J ...
*''Discovery and Revelation: Religion, Science, and Making Sense of Things'', 2022. Coauthored with Andrew Ali Aghapour.
Smithsonian Books
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Found ...