Dr. Benjamin M. Pietrenka

Benjamin M. Pietrenka is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the HCA. His research focuses on the entangled cultural histories of religion, gender, race, and empire in early America and the Atlantic World. He is particularly interested in German influences on the history of British North America and in non-traditional sites of social power and intellectual authority exercised by marginalized and common people in the early modern period. Benjamin Pietrenka completed his graduate training (MA, PhD) in early American history at the University of California Santa Cruz, with a secondary teaching field in cultural anthropology. His research has been generously funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the United States Fulbright Commission, the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), the German Historical Institute (GHI), the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), and the Institute for Humanities Research (IHR), among others.

His recently published book, Religion on the Margins: Embodied Moravian Pieties on the Edges of Atlantic World Empire (2024), examines the believers and lay missionaries of the eighteenth-century Moravian Church, a radical group of German Pietists who sought to build a cosmopolitan community centered on an eschatological global vision while navigating diverse cultures, unfamiliar power structures, and the institution of slavery. He is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled Languages of Faith: Translating Scripture in Protestant Early America, which explores the history of German and English Protestant cultures of translation and how revisionings of the Bible functioned as engines of community formation in British North America.

• Religious History (esp. German Pietism and Early Evangelicalism)
• Early American History and Culture
• Race, Gender, and Empire
• German Culture
• History of Biblical Interpretation
• Atlantic World History

2021-2024: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Theology & Church History
2017-2020: Postdoctoral Researcher & Lecturer, Heidelberg Center for American Studies and Faculty of Theology & Church History
2017: PhD in History, University of California, Santa Cruz
201: MA in History

Religion on the Margins: Embodied Moravian Pieties on the Edges of Atlantic World Empire. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024.
“The Pluralization of Scripture in Early American Protestantism: Competing Bible Translations and the Debate over Universal Salvation, ca. 1700-1780,” with Jan Stievermann, Religion and American Culture 33, no. 1 (2023), pp 35-74.
“Bringing the New World Home: Moravian Gemeintag Meetings and Protestant Pastoral Authority, 1738–1746,” Journal of Early Modern History 26, no. 6 (2022), pp 544-568.
 “Spirit of the Word: Scripture in the Lives of Evangelical and Moravian Women in the New World, 1730-1830,” in: Ryan Hoselton et al. (eds.), The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism. University Park: Penn State UP, 2022, pp 242-60.
“Bloody Bodies: Embodied Moravian Piety in Atlantic World Travel Diaries, 1735-1765,” in: Elisabeth Fischer and Xenia von Tippelskirch (eds.), Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent. New York: Routledge, 2021, pp 84-102.

• Research Fellow for the DFG Project: “(Re-)Translating Scripture in Early American Protestantism: A Comparative Study of Cotton Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana’ and Radical Pietist Revisionings of the Bible” (432593169)
• Researcher & Editorial Assistant for the “Biblia Americana Project,” vol. 10