People

ADVISORY COMMITTEE

M. SHAWN COPELAND
PhD, Boston College
BA, Madonna College

M. Shawn Copeland is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Boston College, where she also teaches in the Interdisciplinary Program in African and African Diaspora Studies. She also is an adjunct Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies, Xavier University of Louisiana.

Copeland's research interests run in three intersecting lines: The first focuses on shifts in theological understanding of the human person or theological anthropology and accords particular attention to body, gender, and race; suffering, solidarity, and the cross of Jesus of Nazareth. The second line of inquiry interrogates the African American Catholic experience, and aims to thematize an African American Catholic theology. Here her research attends to theological method and history, religious and cultural Africanisms in black vernacular experience, spirituality and the process of traditioning. The third line of research takes up issues pertinent to political or praxis-based theologies and critically analyzes the religious, cultural, and social (i.e., political, economic, and technological) conditions under which human persons seek to realize their humanity.

M. Shawn Copeland received her PhD in Systematic Theology from Boston College with a dissertation on the notion of the human good in the thought of theologian-philosopher Bernard Lonergan. She has taught at St. Norbert College, Yale Divinity School, and Marquette University, before going to Boston College in 2003. She teaches courses on social suffering, political theology, African American religious experience, and theological anthropology. Copeland lectures frequently on college and university campuses on topics related to theological anthropology, political theology, gender and race, racism and religion. At the same time, she is recognized as one of the most important influences in North America in drawing attention to issues surrounding African American Catholics.

Copeland is the author of The Subversive Power of Love: The Vision of Henriette Delille (Paulist Press 2009) and editor of Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience (Orbis 2009), and Fortress will publish her Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being in fall 2009.