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May 2009
Two Scholars of American Religious
History Appointed to HDS Faculty
Contact:
Jonathan Beasley, 617.496.6004
Renowned scholars of American religious history R. Marie Griffith and
Leigh Eric Schmidt have been appointed to the HDS faculty, effective
July 1, 2009. Griffith will be the John A. Bartlett Professor of New
England Church History, and Schmidt will be the Charles Warren Professor
of the History of Religion in America.
"Leigh Schmidt and Marie Griffith are, in their own ways and areas of
interest, two of the very best mid-career historians of American
religion active in the academy today," said Dean William A. Graham.
"They join a very strong set of colleagues in this and related fields
already at HDS. Considering also the strong scholars in various
departments across Harvard, Leigh and Marie fill out an unusually strong
cadre of Americanists at Harvard who work on religious history either
primarily or as a significant part of their particular scholarly areas
of focus."
Griffith is currently Professor of Religion at Princeton University,
where she also serves as director of the university's Program in the
Study of Women and Gender. Her first book, God's Daughters:
Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (University of
California Press, 1997) established her as a pioneer in the study of
modern evangelical women. A prolific author, her articles have appeared
in, among other places, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
American Quarterly, and Harvard Divinity Bulletin.
Griffith received her doctorate from Harvard's Committee on the Study
of Religion in 1995 and was a Research Associate at Harvard Divinity
School's Women's Studies in Religion Program in 2002-03, when she worked
on Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity
(University of California Press, 2004), which explores the religious
underpinnings of the ideologies of the body that play a central role in
American consumer culture. Her latest book project will examine
sexuality debates in twentieth-century U.S. Christianity.
"Marie is one of the most creative scholars exploring religion in the
context of American history," said Ann D. Braude, Senior Lecturer on
American Religious History and Director of the Women's Studies in
Religion Program at HDS. "Her work has forced the academy to move beyond
cardboard stereotypes of evangelical women in particular, raising
provocative questions about the relation of religion to women's agency,
women's bodies, and women's relationships. She is a great ambassador for
the study of religion to the fields of American studies, women's
studies, and the history of sexuality."
Leigh Schmidt is currently the Agate Brown and George L. Collard
Professor of Religion and chair of the Department of Religion at
Princeton, where he has taught since 1995. He has held prestigious
fellowships at Stanford, Princeton, and the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
"I have an abiding fascination with the history of American religious
liberalism, and it is hard to imagine a more fruitful place in which to
pursue those interests and that history than at Harvard," Schmidt said.
"The history of the practice of studying religion is one of my
long-standing areas of interest, and Harvard offers an ideal
intellectual community for reflecting on the contemporary discipline as
well its historical formation."
Schmidt is the author of numerous books, including Hearing Things:
Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard
University Press, 2000), which won the American Academy of Religion
Award for Excellence in Historical Studies.
"Leigh Schmidt is an unusually imaginative, creative, and prolific
historian, whose published works straddle the Atlantic and cover a wide
chronology," said David N. Hempton, Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor
of Evangelical Theological Studies at HDS. "Often with striking
originality, he is able to bring together intellectual and popular
history, religious studies and social history, and theological ideas and
lived religion. He has written about how religion shapes and is shaped
by time, space, sound, parades, holidays, festivals, visual culture,
spirituality, and secularization. His expertise will not only enliven
programs in American religious history at Harvard, but will also connect
with scholars across many different disciplines."
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