Ann D. Braude
Director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program
Education
- AB, Vassar College
- MA, University of Chicago
- PhD, Yale University
Profile
Ann Braude serves as the director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program and as Senior Lecturer on American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School. She joined the faculty in 1998 after serving as an associate professor first at Carleton College then at Macalester College, both in Minnesota.
Her 1996 article “Women’s History Is American Religious History,” articulates her agenda as a scholar committed to creating more inclusive narratives of American religion. In Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-century America, she explores the engagement between the women's rights movement and the religious movement focused on contact with spirits of the dead. Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion, is a synthesis of the religious history of American women.
Strongly committed to creating more inclusive archives for future historians, she convened an historic conference that brought 25 pioneers of religious feminism together at HDS, and resulted in the volume Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: The Women Who Changed American Religion. In 2005 she inaugurated the School's year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to HDS with a convocation address entitled "A Short Half-Century: Fifty Years of Women at Harvard Divinity School." For the school’s bicentennial in 2016 she curated a school-wide photo exhibition, “Faces of Divinity: Envisioning Inclusion for 200 Years.”
A long term interest in the ways that indigenous histories and perspectives challenge the conceptual frameworks of Religious Studies, Braude organizes her course “Issues in the Study of Native American Religion,” around a Native American Speakers Series held every other year at HDS for the last decade. Braude’s current research focuses on abstract painting in relation to gender and spirituality.
Courses
View HDS courses taught by Ann Braude in the my.harvard Course Search.
Also view FAS courses taught by Ann Braude. (HDS students: for jointly offered and reading and research courses, please enroll in the HDS version of the course.)
Selected publications
- “Paths to Abstraction: Spirituality in the Work of Three Women” presentation, Persisting Souls in Literature, Art, History and Philosophy Conference, Paris, April 2019
- Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
- Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Indiana University Press, 2d ed., 2008)
- Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2007)
- Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: The Women Who Changed American Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
Assistant
See also
- “Paths to Abstraction: Spirituality in the Work of Three Women,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin
- "Convocation for a Bicentennial," Harvard Magazine, September 9, 2016.
- "Bringing Faces of Divinity to Life," Harvard Divinity School, August 8,2016
- "Outfitting Hasidic Women with Stylish, yet Modest, Fashions," The New York Times, March 21, 2016.
- "Harvard Professor Reflects Fondly on '60s Activism with Friend Corita Kent," WBUR, October 25, 2015.
- "Was End of Standoff with Vatican a Win for U.S. Nuns? More of a Draw," Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2015.
- Women's Studies in Religion Program website
- "A Short Half-Century: Fifty Years of Women at Harvard Divinity School" (2005 Convocation address)
- "Remembering Mary Daly," Beacon Broadside, January 15, 2010
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