Isaiah Ellis
Kingdon Fellow (2024-2025)
Assistant Professor of Urban Religions, Department of Religious Studies, Southern Methodist University
Apostles of Asphalt: Race, Empire, and the Religious Politics of Infrastructure in the American South
We usually imagine infrastructure as offering solutions to problems of mobility and political unification, but grand statements about the positive socio-economic change accompanying infrastructure development grate against renewed criticism of its role in empire-building, structural inequality, and segregation by design. Apostles of Asphalt explores infrastructure’s fraught but central role in the drama of American history by investigating the ideas at the root of the modern highway system. It focuses on the early decades of the twentieth century, when participants in the Good Roads Movement laid the groundwork for a modernized, federally funded highway system. The GRM was especially impactful in the American South, where its members redefined their efforts as a missionary endeavor to civilize American land, not only on behalf of the nation, but also to redeem and reinvigorate the racial regimes of the southern past. The religiously loaded terms that sat at the center of the GRM served it best not by anchoring its projects to a particular tradition or ecclesial institution, but by granting its members a powerful vocabulary for expressing their understanding of what it meant to be, and feel, modern amid a nascent mobility revolution, and to articulate the project of building public infrastructure as a civic and civilizational burden that the white South ought uniquely to shoulder.
Isaiah Ellis is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University, and a member of SMU’s Urban Research Cluster. His research examines the mutually transformative relationships between the built environment and American religious life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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