Rate My Professor Ann D. Braude

Ann D. Braude serves as Senior Lecturer on American Religious History and Director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. She earned an AB from Vassar College, an MA from the University of Chicago, and a PhD from Yale University. Braude joined the Harvard faculty in 1998 after serving as an associate professor at Carleton College and then at Macalester College in Minnesota. Her scholarship centers on the religious history of American women, the engagement between the women’s rights movement and Spiritualism in nineteenth-century America, and efforts to create more inclusive narratives of American religion. Additional research interests include indigenous histories and perspectives that challenge conventional frameworks in religious studies as well as abstract painting in relation to gender and spirituality.

Braude is the author of Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-century America, Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion, Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: The Women Who Changed American Religion (2004), and Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernities (2009). She also wrote the article “Women’s History Is American Religious History” (1996). In 2005 she delivered the convocation address “A Short Half-Century: Fifty Years of Women at Harvard Divinity School.” For the school’s bicentennial in 2016 she curated the exhibition “Faces of Divinity: Envisioning Inclusion for 200 Years.” Braude has convened historic conferences bringing together pioneers of religious feminism. Her work has shaped academic understandings of gender and religion in the United States and continues to influence the field through her leadership of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program.