Dr. Talia Burnside

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Philosophy & Religious Studies

Philosophy & Religious Studies

Dr. Talia Burnside

Lecturer, Philosophy & Religious Studies

Office: Holmes Hall, 309
Phone: 443-885-3436
talia.burnside@morgan.edu

Education:

2025 PhD, Florida State University

2018 MA, Florida State University

2016 BA, Florida State University

2014, AA, St. Petersburg College

Talia Burnside is a scholar of American religion. Her work primarily explores religion in rural America, namely the rural South and Intermountain West, analyzing how marginalized communities navigate complex interactions with the US government. She is interested in how animality, queerness, and racialization structure, and how the state interacts with rural religious communities, animals, and ecology. She likes to teach about religion in global contexts, especially how religion works with and against capitalism, policing, and surveillance.

She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled No Perfect Animal: Religion and Flesh in Rural America, which historicizes the state’s complicated relationships with rural religion and family farms. It argues that the state looked to family farms to provide a religious, sexual, and racial infrastructure in order to construct a productive relationship between rural biomatter and industrial capitalism. Exploring political histories of animals and plants opens up new avenues to study rural religious communities navigating state demands for capitalist reproduction as well as highlighting the queer, Black, and Indigenous life often overlooked in rural America.

Research Interests

Religion in the US

Religion, Animals, and Ecology

Queer and Trans Studies

Race and Racialization

Histories of Bureaucracy and Statecraft