Ryan L. Fletcher

Research Interests

Ryan L. Fletcher received his PhD in history from the University of Mississippi in 2013 and joined the Department of History at Texas A&M University in 2022.  He studies the religious-and-social histories of the rural households that populated the western peripheries of the American South during the nineteenth century. Fletcher’s research surveys how the intersection of religiosity and agricultural labor inside of those rural households contoured distinctive landscapes. Consequently, his work explores how religion served as a compass for rural households in the nineteenth-century South as those households mapped land usage, environmental practices, legal customs, and social hierarchies in their communities. Fletcher is currently writing a religious-and-social history of the Kentucky Shakers.

Areas of Speciality

• 19th-Century U.S.
• American Religions
• U.S. South
• Rural Economies and Agriculture
• Legal History