People

DIRECTOR

Ann Braude, director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program, is on leave for the 2007-08 academic year. The acting director for 2007-08 is Joan Branham.

Ann Braude was appointed director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program and Senior Lecturer on American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School in 1998. In addition to directing the WSRP, she teaches courses on the religious history of American women. Before coming to Harvard she served as associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Macalaster College, and before that in the same position at Carleton College. She has held visiting appointments at Princeton University, the University of Capetown, and in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She received the AB from Vassar College, the MA from the University of Chicago, and the doctorate from Yale University.

Her first book, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in 19th-Century America, now in its second edition, explores the overlap between the early women's rights movement and the unconventional religious movement that viewed contact with the spirits of the dead as proof of the immortality of the soul. Dr. Braude is also the author of Women and Religion in America, the first history of the religion of American women for a general audience. She has published many articles on women in Judaism, Christian Science, and American religious life, and served as co-editor of Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women.

In 2002, Dr. Braude organized a historic conference at which 25 pioneers of religious feminism told the stories of their path-breaking efforts. The conference resulted in Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion (Palgrave/Macmillan 2004). Yale University's Center for Religion and American Life awarded Dr. Braude an Advanced Fellowship for her current research on religion and the feminist movement.

Dr. Braude was a featured speaker at the 2001 conference "Generations of Giving: Women, Faith and Philanthropy" and at Middlebury College's 2002 Scott Symposium. She was the keynote speaker at the conference "Women and American Religion: Reimagining the Past" at the University of Chicago Divinity School, October 8-10, 2003, as well as at the 2004 meeting of the National Association of Women in Catholic Higher Education. She serves on advisory boards for the Womanist Scholars Program at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta and the Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, as well as the Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity in Boston, Massachusetts.