Event

The University of Pennsylvania Department of Religious Studies is thrilled to host the first of three Philadelphia-area lectures as part of the American Academy of Religion's prestigious American Lectures in the History of Religions series. Our distinguished speaker is Emilie M. Townes, Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Religion and Black Studies, Boston University School of Theology.

Shadowboxing the Ridiculous

Using a scene from Black Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau’s A Sunday at the Dungeon: Novel as a launching point, I use the lenses of the shocking, the outrageous, decentering horror, and the indecent to probe the ways in which scholarship and teaching that focuses on religion should be grounded in creating greater spaces of justice and hope rather than fear and loathing.
 

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About the Speaker

Dr. Emilie M. Townes, an American Baptist clergywoman, is a native of Durham, North Carolina. She holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Religion in Society and Personality from Northwestern University. Dr. Townes was the Dean and University Distinguished Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society (Divinity) and University Distinguished Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies (College of Arts and Science) at Vanderbilt University, becoming the first African American to serve as Dean of the Divinity School from 2013-2023. She is the former Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology at Yale University Divinity School and in the fall of 2005, she was the first African American woman elected to the presidential line of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and served as president in 2008. She was the first African American and first woman to serve as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Yale Divinity School. She is the former Carolyn Williams Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Social Ethics at Saint Paul School of Theology. Editor of two collection of essays, A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering and Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation; she has also authored Womanist Ethics, Womanist Hope, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness, Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care, and her groundbreaking book, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. She is co-editor with Stephanie Y. Mitchem of the Faith, Health, and Healing in African American Life and co-editor with the late Katie Geneva Cannon and Angela Sims for the Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader done with was published in November 2011. Her most recent co-editorship is with Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Alison Gise Johnson, and Angela Sims for Walking Through the Valley: Essays: Womanist Explorations in the Spirit of Katie Geneva Cannon (2022). Townes was elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. She was the first Black woman to serve as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2008 and served a four-year term as president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion from 2012 to 2016. In 2022, Townes is currently the president of the Society of Christian Ethics and is the first Black woman to hold this office. She joined the Boston University School of Theology faculty in 2024. (she, her, hers)

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