About
Terra Sage Wallin (she/they) is a doctoral student in Religious Studies at the University of Chicago Divinity School, specializing in Religion in the Americas. Her interdisciplinary work brings together American religion, digital media studies, gender and sexuality, environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, and the study of contemporary political culture.
Her research examines how religious and political worlds become persuasive through media, performance, aesthetics, affect, and everyday practice. She is particularly interested in movements organized around narratives of return: return to tradition, nature, domesticity, ancestry, spiritual authenticity, or an imagined social order. Across her work, Terra Sage asks how these visions are produced, circulated, and made emotionally compelling, and how ideas about gender, race, land, authority, and belonging become embedded within them.
Terra Sage’s current research focuses on the digital TradWife movement, right-wing ecologism, online spirituality, new religious movements, and contemporary religious media cultures. She studies social media platforms, influencer content, conferences, political events, and digital communities as sites where identities, moral worlds, and forms of authority are performed and negotiated. Her methodological interests include digital ethnography, close reading, discourse and media analysis, performance theory, and the study of audience participation.
She earned her MA in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her thesis, The Grammar of Return: Tradition, Gendered Performance, and Moral Formation in the Digital TradWife Movement, examined how online performances of domesticity, femininity, nature, and historical nostalgia teach audiences to recognize and desire particular visions of the traditional. She also holds a BA in Environmental Studies and Philosophy from UCSB, where her studies focused in part on Native American Traditional Ecological Knowledges. This interdisciplinary background continues to shape her attention to landscapes, environmental imaginaries, moral formation, and the political meanings attached to nature.
Alongside her research, Terra Sage has been deeply involved in community-engaged Indigenous studies work at UCSB. In collaboration with UCSB’s American Indian and Indigenous Students’ Association and the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, she helped develop ES 194TK, a community-led course that brings classroom learning into relationship with hands-on practice in the campus Three Sisters, Four Directions, and Wetlands gardens. She also co-founded the TEK Lab Mentorship Program, which supports undergraduate student leaders as they facilitate the course, mentor newer participants, and continue relationships of care with these campus spaces. Her work on ES 194TK was recognized with the 2023 Community Contribution Award at UCSB’s Annual Harvest Dinner.
Terra Sage’s service at UCSB has included leadership roles in the American Indian and Indigenous Students’ Association and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, as well as undergraduate and graduate representation on the American Indian and Indigenous Academic Council. She has also worked with the American Indian and Indigenous Collective Center, coordinating events, student programming, research initiatives, and operational support. These experiences have shaped her commitment to collaborative scholarship, institutional accountability, and sustained relationships among knowledge, community, and place.
Her broader research interests include religion and ecology, settler colonialism, Indigenous studies, digital religion, gender and religion, American Christianity and popular culture, alternative spiritualities, Mormonism, new religious movements, political theology, pedagogy, and the relationship between religious authority and digital culture. She is especially drawn to projects that move across disciplinary boundaries and take popular culture, online communities, landscapes, and everyday aesthetic practices seriously as sites of religious meaning.
Terra Sage is also committed to teaching and mentorship. Her teaching interests include religion in the United States, digital religion, religion and ecology, Indigenous religions, gender and sexuality, new religious movements, environmental humanities, and the study of religion and popular culture. She approaches religion as something lived through bodies, technologies, institutions, images, landscapes, and public life, and she encourages students to examine how religious ideas become meaningful through the worlds people build around them.
