This year, Ashbrook has an addition of an Archer Fellow in Residence, who is Daniel Gullotta.

Gullotta is originally from Australia and has now lived in the United States for about 10 years. His wife is from Kansas and the two met at a comic book convention in Las Vegas, but to impress his partner at the time Gullotta thought he should learn about American history.

“I don’t know if this is dating advice, but I figured if I wanted to woo my partner I should learn American history,” said Gullotta. “And I got bit by the American history, religion and culture bug.”

After being “bit by the bug,” Gullotta went on to pursue his Master’s from Yale and is currently in the process of getting his Ph.D. from Stanford University in American Religious History.

His research currently focuses on Andrew Jackson and focuses on religious politics and the birth of the Democratic Party. He also has an interest in how the Democratic Party has formed a religious coalition.

“Maybe it’s because I’m Australian, but one of the things that really struck me, you know, people like, well, the Republican Party is the religious party and the Democrats and the nonreligious party,” said Gullotta.

There are a few reasons Gullotta chose the path of American Religious History is because of the number of books, galleries, archives and collections across the entire country unlike studying the ancients, in which there are few amounts of works and artifacts to examine and study.

“But as a scholar, one of things that really excites me is that, compared to the ancient world where you might have haradas, some broken clay jars, some graffiti, and that’s it,” Gullotta said. “In the American landscape, there are tons and tons of volumes in archives and libraries, private collections, galleries and universities across the country and some people just haven’t even touched it yet.”

Gullotta ended up at the Ashbrook Center from a phone call and email from Dr. Greg McBrayer, associate professor of political science at AU.

“He was saying that the Ashbrook Center was cooking up new projects and one of the things they were really interested in was religion,” said Gullotta.

McBrayer asked him if he would be interested in giving a seminar and Gullotta took the opportunity.

Gullotta came to the Ashbrook Center and gave a lecture on Jackson and Adams and religious politics in the election of 1824. After giving the lecture, he taught a class on American Prophets such as Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of Mormonism and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet who led one of the strongest resistances in the United States.

A few months later, after visiting the Ashbrook Center, Gullotta received a call from the Executive Director of the Ashbrook Center, Jeff Sikkenga asking if he would like to join them at the Ashbrook Center.

“And now I’m here as the Archer Fellow in residence,” said Gullotta.

This semester at AU, he has been teaching American History to the Civil War, Exploring the Bible, and this spring he is excited to teach a class on American witches, witch hunting and witchcraft.

According to Gullotta, the course will explore the classics like the Salem Witch Trials and the 1980s Satanic panic, and the class will end with asking the question “is QAnon a new satanic panic.”

Gullotta has enjoyed teaching so far and has found the most rewarding thing about teaching is as Gullotta puts it, “Many students don’t realize they’re interested in the things that they’re quote, unquote, forced to study.”

He mentioned how many students in his exploring the Bible class said that they were not Christian and did not care, but the Bible is quoted by some of the most powerful people, and several have been influenced by the Bible, like Shakespeare. Other students, as he mentioned, have confessed early that they took the class because they thought they already knew the Bible, but have begun to realize that they are learning new things.

Gullotta’s favorite things at AU are the colleagues that wish him well and that the students like to check in on him.

“At other universities I have been at, it is just very publish or perish. You have to always be working on something and even your teaching takes the back burner or your research takes the back burner,” he said.

He also mentioned how the faculty at the Ashbrook Center has been helpful in checking up on him or the classes that he has been teaching.

Gullotta hopes that he will be able to have the opportunity to teach at AU next year to continue teaching classes.