2023 Archival Research Lecture 

In the United States, museums are respected cultural institutions and are viewed as places for education, tourism, or the cultivation of civic virtue—supposedly secular purposes. But many museums challenge this simple characterization, including museums owned and operated by evangelical Christians. In this lecture, Dr. Devin Manzullo-Thomas will draw on his extensive research conducted in the Evangelism & Missions Archives at Wheaton College to examine the long history of evangelical museums in America, including Wheaton’s own Billy Graham Center Museum. The talk will explore how these museums came to exist, the narratives they promote, and how they impact public culture in the United States today.

Following the lecture will be a reception and exhibit of documents from the Archives.

Devin Manzullo-Thomas is Assistant Professor of American Religious History at Messiah University, where he also serves as the Director of the E. Morris and Leone Sider Institute for Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan Studies. His first book, Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Commemoration and Religion’s Presence of the Past, was published by the University of Massachusetts’ Press in 2022.

Co-Sponsored by the Aequitas Fellows Program in Public Humanities and Arts and the Wheaton College History Department.

For more information, contact Wheaton Archives & Special Collections at 630-752-5910 or archives@wheaton.edu.