• Angela Tarango joined the Department of Religion in 2009 as an Assistant Professor. She received a B.A. as a double major in Religion and History from Wellesley College in 2001. She went on to attend Harvard Divinity School where she graduated with a M.T.S. in 2003.

    She received a Ph.D. in American Religions from Duke University in 2009, with specialties in Native American religions, American Pentecostalism, and missionary history.

    Prior to coming to Trinity, Tarango was a C.F.D. Dissertation Fellow in the departments of Religion and Comparative American studies at Oberlin College. Her first book Choosing the Jesus Way: Native American Pentecostals and the Fight For the Indigenous Principle, (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) focuses on how Native American leaders in the Assemblies of God re-interpreted Pentecostal missionary theology as a religious practice and used it as a tool with which to criticize how the white leadership of the AG treated Native converts. The book won the 2015 Pnuema Book Award, which is given by the Society of Pentecostal Studies for best book of the year in the field of Pentecostal/Charismatic studies.

    Other recent work includes "Hunting Buffalo in Oklahoma: Native American Casinos, Constructed Identities, and Portrayals of Native Culture and Religion," which was a published in The Business Turn in American Religious History (2017) and "Native American Religions in the Twentieth Century," which was published in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (2018). 

    Tarango is currently working on multiple projects. Her next book project is an ethnohistory of San Antonio's La Trinidad United Methodist Church, one of the last large Mexican-American Methodist churches in the region, and how religion, race and the borderlands have shaped Latino Mainline Protestantism. Her other long-term project focuses on the Navajo (Dine) nation in the mid-twentieth century and battles over leadership, sovereignty, and religious identity within the nation's political elite.

    • Ph.D., Duke University
    • M.T.S., Harvard University
    • B.A., Wellesley College

    Tarango's main scholarly interests include modern Native American religious identities, Native American Christianity, and the ways that race and racial constructions affect religious belief, religious groups, and theologies in the Americas.

    • American Religions
    • Native American Religion
    • Latino Traditions and Religions
    • Afro-American and Afro-Carribean Traditions and Religions
    • Modern History of Christianity