Benjamin Pietrenka

Areas of Specialization

Early America, Early Modern Atlantic World, Religion, Women & Gender, Race, Empire, German Culture

Education

Ph.D., University of California Santa Cruz
M.A., University of California Santa Cruz
B.A., University of California Santa Cruz  

Academic Interests & Research Narrative

I am a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world whose research explores the entangled cultural histories of religion, gender, race, and empire. I focus on the cross-cultural dynamics of early American religion, particularly how transatlantic encounters reshaped local beliefs and practices.

My first book, Religion on the Margins: Embodied Moravian Pieties on the Edges of Atlantic World Empire (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024), examines the believers and lay missionaries of the eighteenth-century Moravian Church, an influential group of radical German Pietists who sought to build a cosmopolitan community centered on an eschatological global vision while navigating diverse cultures, unfamiliar power dynamics, and the institution of slavery. I explore how ordinary Moravian believers, shaped by the broader German Pietism movement, asserted forms of collective agency and identity in colonial spaces beyond traditional ecclesiastical structures while concurrently challenging and conforming to European gender hierarchies and negotiating cultural differences.

My current book project, tentatively titled Languages of Faith: Translating Scripture in Protestant Early America, compares early modern German and English Protestant cultures of translation. The project demonstrates how various German-language Bible translations operated alongside English-language attempts to revise the KJV—especially Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana—and a proliferating practice of scripturalization (the process by which texts become sacred and authoritative) collectively served as engines of community formation and religious diversity in British North America.

Before coming to Baylor, I was a post-doctoral fellow and lecturer at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies and the Faculty of Theology & Church History at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany.

Selected Publications

Books

Religion on the Margins: Embodied Moravian Pieties on the Edges of Atlantic World Empire (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024)

Articles

“Moravian Missions, Believers, and the Halle-Herrnhut Controversy, 1727-1737,” Church History 94, no. 3 (2026): 469-490.

“From Text to Ritual: Radical Pietist Approaches to Scriptural Translation and Protestant Diversity in Early America,” Early American Studies 23, no. 3 (2025): 295-325.

“The Pluralization of Scripture in Early American Protestantism: Competing Bible Translations and the Debate over Universal Salvation, ca. 1700-1780,” Religion and American Culture 33, no. 1 (2023): 35-74. [co-authored with Jan Stievermann]

“Bringing the New World Home: Moravian Gemeintag Meetings and Protestant Pastoral Authority, 1738-1746,” Journal of Early Modern History 26, no. 6 (2022): 544-568.

Book Chapters

“Observing Otherness: Proto-Racial Constructions of African and Indigenous Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Moravian Missions,” in Land, Slavery, and Race in the Moravian World, 1750-1950, ed. James Paxton and Heikki Lempa (forthcoming from Pennsylvania State UP, Fall 2026).

“Spirit of the Word: Scripture in the Lives of Evangelical and Moravian Women in the New World, 1730-1830,” in The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism, ed. Ryan Hoselton, et al (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 242-260. [co-authored with Marilyn Westerkamp]

"Bloody Bodies: Embodied Moravian Piety in Atlantic World Travel Diaries, 1735-1765,” in Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent, ed. Elisabether Fischer and Xenia von Tippelskirch (New York: Routledge, 2021), 84-102.

Essays

“Bible Translations and the Making of Early America,” Early American Studies Miscellany, September 2025

Selected Fellowships and Grants

• Special Collections Teaching Fellowship, Baylor University (2026)
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), Ruprecht Karls Universität Heidelberg (2021-2024)
• Dissertation Fellowship, Leibniz Institute of European History, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (2016-2017)
• Fulbright IIE Research Fellowship (2014-2015)
• Vernon Nelson Memorial Research Grant, Moravian Archives Bethlehem (2020)
• DAAD Research Grant (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) (2015-2016)

Regular Course Offerings

• HIS 1300 | US in Global Perspectives – Religion in the U.S. and the World
• HIS 1365 | US History to 1877
• HIS 3372 | American Colonial History

Work with Students

• Willing to advise undergraduate theses and direct undergraduate research.
• Willing to advise graduate independent study and comprehensive exam fields.