Rachel Ozanne
Lecturer — Ph.D., University of Texas

Contact
- E-mail: rachel.ozanne@austin.utexas.edu
- Phone: 512-475-6870
- Office: GAR 3.226
- Office Hours: Spring 2021: M/W, 4:30-5:30pm on Zoom. Check class Canvas page or email to request link
- Campus Mail Code: B7000
Interests
19th century religion in the United States; theory of religion and religious experiences; intellectual history; history of psychology; ethics of Sainthood; Texas history
Biography
Rachel Ozanne grew up in Dallas, Texas. She first came to the University of Texas at Austin in 2002, where she received her BA in Plan II and History in 2006. Her undergraduate Honors Thesis explored Kierkegaard's notion of faith and its relationship to the Christian community. Ozanne entered the history graduate program at UT in 2007. Her MA report, "The Healing Subconscious," investigated the historiography of psychology and religion by means of an early 20th-century pastoral counseling movement--the Emmanuel movement.
She received her Ph.D. in U.S. history from UT in May 2013 for her dissertation entitled, "Revelating Hicksites and Prophesying Seventh-day Adventists: Individual Religious Experiences and Community Ethics in Antebellum America." This work compared the visionary leadership of Elias Hicks, founder of Hicksite Quakerism, and Ellen G. White, founder of Seventh-day Adventism, to explore the relationship between religious experiences, religious communities' foundations, and the development of communal morality. She combined more traditional historical understandings of community formation in antebellum American with methods employed by scholars of religion to provide a clearer picture of the development of unique groups during this era of increased religious diversity. In particular, she argued that scholars must employ both Ann Taves’ and William James’ methods to study visions and revelations to comprehend how communities addressed the problem of religious experiences’ interiority through communal processes of evaluation.
In recent years, Ozanne has edited and written the introduction to the late Professor Norman Brown's second book about Texas political history, Biscuits, The Dole, and Nodding Donkeys: Texas Politics, 1929-1932 for UT Press, which was published in October 2019. She has also written about religious history and experience in digital and print media for The Appendix, Religion Dispatches, and Not Even Past. Her essay "Becoming Lost" was published in an anthology called Empty the Pews with Epiphany Press in December 2019. She is also composing a book manuscript that combines her interest in religious studies with personal memoir and beginning a new research project on the religious history of Texas. In addition to her work as a lecturer at UT Austin, she works as a freelance writer and editor.