Scholarship and Biography
Maura Jane Farrelly is Professor and chair of American Studies at Brandeis University. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Emory University, with an emphasis on religion and the colonial and early-American periods.
Farrelly is the author of Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (Oxford University Press, 2012); Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent: A Story of Mystery and Tragedy on the Gilded Age Frontier (Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2024).
Before joining the faculty at Brandeis, Farrelly worked as a full-time reporter, first for Georgia Public Radio in Atlanta and then for the Voice of America in Washington, D.C., and New York.
Farrelly has also freelanced for National Public Radio, Public Radio International and the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Her scholarly research and publications have focused on Catholicism and Methodism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Specific issues of interest have included the role of religion in the shaping of American identity, the relationship between religious asceticism and American understandings of freedom, and the origins and development of religious "relativism" in the United States.