Lori  Branch  is associate professor of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literature  at the University of Iowa. Her first book,  Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth, was named 2007 Book of the Year by the Conference on  Christianity and Literature. She has published widely on literature, religion, and the postsecular, from the fourth-century  Sayings of the Desert Fathers  to seventeenth-century Dissent and Eastern Orthodoxy, and lectures on postsecular studies in Europe, the US, and China. She was a member of the Mellon Working Group on Religion and Literature at the University of Notre Dame,  the collaborative work of which appears in Religion & Literature  (46.2-3). She is currently at work on a book project titled  Postsecular Reason. Lori co-directed a previous iteration of this NEH seminar with Mark Knight in 2016. She edits the Ohio State University Press book series, Literature, Religion and Postsecular Studies. She edits the “Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies” series at Ohio State University Press.