2025-2026 Travel Award Recipient: Chloe Landen

“Race, Religion, and the Rise of Privatized Execution: A Look at the Legacy of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching”

Biography- Chloe Landen

Chloe Landen is a PhD student in the University of Texas’s Department of Religious Studies. Her work focuses on U.S. Protestantism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular interests in the Social Gospel movement and narratives of national belonging. Her current project examines the intersection of religion, anti-lynching activism, and the privatization of execution by chronicling the activism of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL)—an understudied organization composed entirely of white southern women. Chloe’s research investigates how narratives of domesticity and white womanhood intertwined with the ASWPL’s social gospel religious worldview, influencing their campaign to regulate and purify the public sphere from the ‘visible sin’ of spectacle lynching. Her work reveals how their campaign shaped the broader societal shift from public to private, behind-closed-door penal executions and contributed to greater national reconciliation in the years preceding World War II.

Chloe earned her BA in Rhetoric & Writing and Religious Studies from UT Austin in 2021. She completed a Master of Theological Studies at Harvard University in 2023, where she studied how Protestantism and the Social Gospel movement shaped national identity and narratives of chosenness. A Texas native, Chloe returned to UT Austin with an interest in exploring the often-overlooked southern social gospel.