Jeff Turner Assistant Professor

Research:

•  His research traces the ways that migrants, immigration inspectors, and policymakers constructed religion at the U.S. border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
• In this context, officials made legal “tests” as proxies for immigrant religiosity–like questions about polygamy–and migrants answered about their religions.
• The border, then, became a site where these individuals made desirable and undesirable religion.