Judith Weisenfeld

“Religion and Race in American History”

Religion and race have been entangled throughout American history, with religion contributing to the production of ideas about race and ideas about race shaping the religious possibilities and theological claims of differently racialized peoples. Moreover, these intertwined constructions of race and religion have developed in a context in which both contribute significantly to understandings of American national identity and citizenship as these have changed over time. In this talk I consider the broad scope of particularly American interactions between religion and race, explore historical cases of religious groups whose members rejected commonplace American ideas about race and religion, and highlight issues from our present moment.

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Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University where she is also Associate Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has served as Acting Director of the Program in American Studies and, beginning Fall 2019, will serve as Chair of the Department of Religion. She received her A.B. in Religion from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. Prior to joining the faculty at Princeton, she taught at Barnard College and at Vassar College, where she chaired the Department of Religion. 

A specialist in early twentieth-century African American religious history, her work has focused on religion and constructions of race, African American women’s religious history, and religion in film and popular culture. She is the author most recently of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (NYU, 2016), which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 (California, 2007), and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945 (Harvard 1997). She co-edited This Far by Faith: Readings in African American Women’s Religious Biography (Routledge, 1995) and is a co-author of The History of Riverside Church in the City of New York (NYU, 2004). She is also a co-editor of the journal Religion & American Culture and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Africana Religions. Her current research explores the intersections of psychiatry, race, and African American religions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States.

Weisenfeld’s work has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Academy of Religion. She is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and an elected fellow of the Society of American Historians, “in recognition of the literary and scholarly distinction” of her historical writing.

From 2012 to 2018, Weisenfeld served as faculty coordinator of Princeton’s Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, which aims to diversify the faculty at institutions of higher education, and she has been a faculty mentor in the program.