Gender and Religion: Authority, Power, and Agency

Speakers' Biographies

Gannit Ankori


Gannit Ankori is the Henya Sharef Professor of Humanities and chair of the Department of Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research and publications explore the artistic manifestations of issues related to gender, religion, nationality, hybridity, immigration, and trauma. Ankori’s most recent book, Palestinian Art (Reaktion, 2006), received the 2007 Polonsky Prize for Creativity and Originality in the Humanistic Disciplines. She has written three books and numerous articles and curated a museum exhibition devoted to Frida Kahlo. Ankori was a visiting scholar at Harvard in 2004–2005 and a research associate and visiting associate professor in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School in 2005–2006. At Harvard, she worked on her forthcoming book, titled “A Faith of Their Own: Women Artists Re-Vision Religion.” It is a comparative study of the complex and vital role played by religious symbols, images, and rituals in the artistic oeuvres of several outstanding women artists from diverse ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. In analyzing their hybrid religious revisions, alternative cosmologies, and personalized rituals, we discover that even as they created art, these artists forged a faith of their own.

Ann D. Braude


Ann D. Braude is director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and a senior lecturer on American religious history at Harvard Divinity School. Her interests are in the religious history of American women and in Native American religions. She is currently researching a Cheyenne child who was taken captive at the Sand Creek Massacre. Her first book, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-century America (Beacon Press, 1989), documents the role of spiritualist trance speakers as the first large group of American women to speak in public, and examines the sympathy between the radical individualism of their religious practices and that of their political platform. She has published articles on women in Judaism, Christian Science, and American religious life; coedited Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (Northeastern, 2006); and edited Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). In 2005, she inaugurated the Harvard Divinity School’s yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of its admission of women with a convocation address, “A Short Half-Century: Fifty Years of Women at Harvard Divinity School,” subsequently published in Harvard Magazine and in a special issue of the Harvard Theological Review, for which she served as guest editor. Braude’s most recent book is Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Catherine Brekus


Catherine Brekus is an associate professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School and an associate member of the Department of History. She is the author of the prize-winning Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and editor of The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Currently, Brekus is working on two projects: a book, titled “Sarah Osborn’s World: Popular Christianity in Early America,” and an edited collection, titled “American Christianities.” A former editor of the Journal of Religion, she has received many awards, including a Henry Luce III Faculty Fellowship in Theology and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She received her PhD in American studies from Yale University in 1993.

Bernadette J. Brooten


Bernadette J. Brooten is the Robert and Myra Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Professor of Christian Studies, a professor of women’s and gender studies, and director of the Feminist Sexual Ethics Project in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, all at Brandeis University. She has written Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (Scholars Press, 1982) and Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (University of Chicago Press, 1996), for which she received three awards. She has also published articles on various topics of ancient Jewish and early Christian women’s history and is currently writing a book on early Christian women who were enslaved or who were slave-holding and editing a volume on slavery’s long shadow over the lives of girls and women. Brooten studied at the University of Portland, where she earned her bachelor’s, the University of Tübingen, the Hebrew University, and Harvard University, where she earned her doctorate. She has taught at Claremont College, Harvard, University of Oslo, and Tübingen. Brooten has been awarded fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Harvard Law School, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other organizations.

Caroline Walker Bynum


Caroline Walker Bynum studies European religious ideas and practices. In the 1980s she was instrumental in introducing the concept of gender into Medieval studies; in the 1990s her books provided a paradigm for the history of the body. She received her BA from the University of Michigan and her PhD from Harvard University in 1969. She has taught at Harvard, the University of Washington, and Columbia University. In 2003 she became a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was a MacArthur Fellow from 1986 to 1991 and holds twelve honorary degrees. Her articles have won prizes from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the Renaissance Society of America. Her books have won the Phillip Schaff Prize of the American Society of Church History, the Trilling Prize from Columbia University, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from the Phi Beta Kappa, and the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. She has received teaching awards from the University of Washington and Columbia University. Her book, Wonderful Blood (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), a study of blood piety in northern Germany in its European context, has been awarded the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence. She is currently working on the role of objects in medieval religion.

Lisa Sowle Cahill


Lisa Sowle Cahill is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., Professor at Boston College, where she has taught theology since 1976. She has served as an editor or on the editorial boards of Concilium, Horizons, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, Journal of Law and Religion, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Journal of Religious Ethics, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, Religious Studies Review, and Second Opinion. She has been a visiting scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University and a visiting professor of Catholic theology at Yale University. Cahill's areas of interest are fundamental theological ethics, ethics of sex and gender, bioethics, just war theory and pacifism, and the history of Christian ethics. Her most recent publications are Sexuality and the U.S. Catholic Church, edited with John Garvey and T. Frank Kennedy (Herder & Herder, 2006) and Theological Bioethics:  Participation, Justice and Change (Georgetown University Press, 2005). She is a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Society of Christian Ethics. Cahill has been a member of the Catholic Health Association Theology and Ethics Advisory Committee, the National Advisory Board for Ethics in Reproduction, and the March of Dimes National Bioethics Committee. Cahill is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Advisory Board of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network. She received her BA in theology from Santa Clara University and her MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Shaye J. D. Cohen


Shaye J. D. Cohen is the Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Before arriving at Harvard in July 2001, he was the Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and professor of religious studies at Brown University. Cohen began his career at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was ordained and where, for many years, he served as dean of the graduate school and the Shenkman Professor of Jewish History. He is perhaps best known for his book From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Westminster Press, 1987; Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), which is widely used as a textbook in colleges and adult education. More recently, he is the author of The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (University of California Press, 1999) and Why aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism (University of California Press, 2005), which won a National Jewish Book Award. He has also appeared on educational television, including From Jesus to Christ and Nova on PBS and Mysteries of the Bible on A&E. He and his wife Miriam May are the parents of four children.

Harvey Cox


Harvey Cox is the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard University, where he has been teaching both in the Divinity School and at Harvard College since 1965. Author of The Secular City; Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (Macmillan, 1965), Feast of Fools; a Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Harvard University Press, 1969), and When Jesus Came to Harvard: Making Moral Choices Today (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), he is now writing a book on the significance of the unexpected resurgence of religion in the late 20th-century that continues today. He teaches courses on comparative fundamentalisms, liberation theology, Pentacostalism, and Western attitudes toward Islam. Cox is especially interested in why so many resurgent religious movements concentrate their energies on the status, behavior, and dress of women. He has lectured and taught in Brazil, China, Japan, India, and Russia and is active in efforts to find a just peace in the Middle East and in abolishing nuclear weapons. His wife, Nina Tumarkin, is a professor of history at Wellesley College.

John Demos


John Demos is the Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1986, he was a member of the History Department at Brandeis University. He teaches and writes about early American history. His books include A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (Oxford University Press, 1970), Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford University Press, 1982), The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (Alfred Knopf, 1994), and Circles and Lines: The Shape of Life in Early America (Harvard University Press, 2004). He is an alumnus of Harvard College and did graduate work at Oxford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Harvard University. Demos and his wife Virginia, a clinical and developmental psychologist, live in Tyringham, Massachusetts.

Carol B. Duncan


Carol B. Duncan is an associate professor in and chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. Her areas of interest include Caribbean religions, the African Diaspora, Caribbean immigration to North America, and religion and popular culture. Duncan is coauthor of Black Religious Studies: An Introduction (Abingdon Press, 2007) and author of This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008). She consulted on, and appears in, the award-winning 2004 documentary Seeking Salvation: A History of the Black Church in Canada. She has published numerous articles on the Spiritual Baptist religion, Caribbean women’s religious experiences, and race, gender, and cultural representation in film and video. In 2006–2007, she was a visiting associate professor and research fellow in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Duncan’s scholarship and teaching has been recognized with several awards, fellowships, and lectureships in Canada and the United States. She has presented scholarly papers in Canada, throughout the United States, and internationally, including in Belgium, Cuba, France, and Puerto Rico.

Diana L. Eck


Diana L. Eck is a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard University and chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion in its Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is also a member of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies and the Faculty of Divinity. Eck has written widely on India. Her book Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras (Beacon Press, 1993) proposes a Christian theology of pluralism in the context of interfaith relations. More recently, A New Religious America: How a “Christian Country” Has Now Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (HarperSanFrancisco, 2001) looks at the new civic issues America faces as a multireligious nation. Eck is the founder and director of the Pluralism Project, a Harvard-based research team, and chair of the National Council of Churches Interfaith Relations Commission. In 1998, she received the National Humanities Medal for her work on American religious pluralism. She received her BA from Smith College in religion, her MA from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, and her PhD from Harvard University in the comparative study of religion. Eck and her spouse Dorothy Austin are masters of Lowell House at Harvard.

Drew Gilpin Faust


Drew Gilpin Faust is the 28th president of Harvard University. A historian of the US Civil War and the American South, Faust is also the Lincoln Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She previously served as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. During her tenure, Faust led Radcliffe’s transformation from a college into one of the country’s foremost scholarly institutes. Before coming to Radcliffe, Faust was Annenberg Professor of History and director of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of six books, including Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), for which she won the Francis Parkman Prize in 1997. Her latest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008), chronicles the impact of the Civil War’s enormous death toll on the lives of 19th-century Americans. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994, the Society of American Historians in 1993, and the American Philosophical Society in 2004. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania.

Sarah Barringer Gordon


Sarah (Sally) Barringer Gordon is the Arlin M. Adams Professor of Constitutional Law and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She trained in law, religion, and history and is particularly interested in the legal rights of minority religious groups. She is the author of The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) and The Spirit of the Law (forthcoming, Harvard University Press). Gordon is also a regular commentator on religion and law on radio, television, and in newspapers.

William A. Graham


William A. Graham is the Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and has served on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University since 1973. Since 2002, he has also served as the John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity and dean of Harvard Divinity School. His scholarship has focused on Islamic religion and topics in the history of religion. In 2000, he received the quinquennial Award for Excellence in Research in Islamic History and Culture from the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art, and Culture in Istanbul. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held Guggenheim and Humboldt fellowships. Among the books he has authored or coauthored, Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam: A Reconsideration of the Sources, with Special Reference to the Divine Saying or Hadîth Qudsî (Mouton, 1977) was awarded the 1978 ACLS History of Religions Prize. He also coedited the series Islamfiche: Readings form Islamic Primary Sources (1982–1987). He received his AB from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his AM and PhD degrees from Harvard.

R. Marie Griffith


R. Marie Griffith, who received the PhD from Harvard University in 1995, is a professor of religion at Princeton University. She currently serves as director of Princeton's Program in the Study of Women and Gender and is also a faculty member in the American studies program. Her field is American religious history, with a specialization in 20th-century Protestant evangelicalism and particular interests in gender, sexuality, and the body. She is the author of God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (University of California Press, 1997) and Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity (University of California Press, 2004). She is also the coeditor, with Barbara D. Savage, of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); and the editor of American Religions: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 2007). Her current project, which will be published by W.W. Norton, analyzes the history of sexuality in American Christianity (Catholicism as well as Protestantism) and the broader impact of specific interreligious debates pertaining to sex in literature and art, science, politics, and popular culture.

Fiona Griffiths


Fiona Griffiths is an assistant professor of history at New York University and a scholar of medieval gender and religion. Her research focuses on 12th-century intellectual and religious culture, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of gender, spirituality, and intellectual engagement. She is the author of The Garden of Delights: Reform and Renaissance for Women in the Twelfth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), which was awarded the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History. Arguing for women’s profound engagement with the spiritual and intellectual vitality of the 12th-century on a level previously thought unimaginable, Griffiths challenges the assumption that women were largely excluded from the “renaissance” and “reform” of this period. Her current project, “Nuns and Priests: Mutuality and Dependence in the Medieval Monastery, 1050–1250,” examines relations between religious women and their priests during the central middle ages. Griffiths holds a PhD from Cambridge University and a BA from the University of Toronto. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

Barbara J. Grosz


Barbara J. Grosz is the interim dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Before becoming interim dean of the Institute, she served as its dean of science, designing and building its science program. Grosz has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1986. Her research in computer science, focused on finding ways to make computers behave more intelligently, draws also on work in linguistics, psychology, economics, and philosophy. Grosz’s research on decision-making and the design of human-computer interfaces is reported in such publications as “The Dynamics of Intentions in Collaborative Intentionality,” Cognitive Systems Research (Special Issue, 2006), and “Beyond Mice and Menus,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (149:4, December 2005). Grosz has led several Harvard efforts aimed at increasing the participation of women in science. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1993, she became the first woman president of the AAAI. She serves on the executive committee and is a former trustee of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence.

Madhu Purnima Kishwar


Madhu Purnima Kishwar, based in Delhi, is a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), the director of the Indic Studies Project at CSDS, and convener of a series of international conferences on religions and cultures in the Indic civilization. Her work at CSDS also focuses on policy and law reform for people in the self-organized sectors of the economy. Kishwar is the founder-editor of Manushi: A Journal About Women and Society, which began publishing in 1979, as well as founder of Manushi Sangathan, an organization committed to strengthening democratic rights and women’s rights in India. Among the books Kishwar has authored or edited are Deepening Democracy: Challenges of Governance and Globalisation in India (Oxford University Press, 2005), Religion at the Service of Nationalism and Other Essays (Oxford University Press, 1998), and Women Bhakta Poets, Lives and Poetry of Women Mystics in India from the 6th to 17th Century, coedited with Ruth Vanita (Manushi Prakashan, 1989).

Janice Love


Janice (Jan) Love is the ninth dean of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Prior to coming to Candler, Love was the chief executive officer of the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church, the administrative arm of the approximately one-million-member United Methodist Women. The division has annual expenditures of more than $30 million and programs and property in more than 100 locations in the United States and 60 other countries. From 1982 to 2004, she served on the faculty at the University of South Carolina in the departments of religious studies and political science. Love served as a representative of the United Methodist Church to the World Council of Churches (WCC) from 1975 to 2006. She served on the WCC board of directors for over two decades and led the WCC delegation to the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. Love is a graduate of Eckerd College, where she earned her bachelor’s, and Ohio State University, where she earned her master’s and doctorate. Her teaching interests include world Christianity, as well as religion and world politics. She is the author of two books on international relations and scores of articles and book chapters.

Ingrid Mattson


Ingrid Mattson is a professor of Islamic studies and the director of the Islamic chaplaincy at the Macdonald Center for Islamic Studies and Christian-Muslim Relations at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut. She has written articles exploring the relationship between Islamic law and society, as well as gender and leadership issues in contemporary Muslim communities. Her introduction to the Islamic sacred text, The Story of the Qur’an: Its History and Place in Muslim Life (Blackwell Publishing, 2008), has been called “compelling” and “a delicate balance of highly scholarly material and inviting anecdotes.” In 2006, Mattson was elected president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA); she previously served two terms as vice president. She was born in Canada, where she studied philosophy and earned her BA at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. In 1987–1988, she lived in Pakistan, where she worked with Afghan refugee women; and she continued to work with Afghan women’s groups after returning to the United States. She earned her PhD in Islamic studies from the University of Chicago. Mattson is frequently consulted by the media, government, and civic organizations and has served as an expert witness. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and children.

Lisa McGirr


Lisa McGirr is a professor of history at Harvard University where she teaches 20th-century United States history. Her book Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press, 2001) examines the social base of the post-World War II conservative movement. McGirr has a broad set of interests that lie at the intersection of social movements and politics. She has conducted research on the transnational social movement around the Sacco and Vanzetti case in the 1920s as well as on the intersection of religion and politics in the 20th-century United States. She is currently at work on a book entitled Prohibition and the Making of Modern America (W.W. Norton, forthcoming). This year McGirr is codirecting the yearlong workshop on social movements and politics at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History.

Afsaneh Najmabadi


Afsaneh Najmabadi teaches history and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University. Her latest book, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (University of California Press, 2005), received the 2005 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize from the American Historical Association. She is an associate editor of the six-volume Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Brill, 2004–2008) and is currently working on the two-volume project “Sex in Change: Configurations of Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Iran,” which includes “Transing and Transpassing Across Sex-Gender Walls in Iran” and “Genus of Sex: Configurations of Sexuality and Gender in 20th-Century Iran.” Najmabadi has been awarded fellowships from the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard Divinity School, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She earned a PhD in sociology at the University of Manchester.

Michelene Pesantubbee


Michelene Pesantubbee is an associate professor of religious studies and American Indian and native studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (University of New Mexico Press, 2005) and the chapter “Beyond Domesticity: Choctaw Women Negotiating the Tension between Choctaw Culture and Protestantism” in Native Women’s History in Eastern North America before 1900: A Guide to Research and Writing (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). She is one of the respondents in the “Roundtable Discussion: Native/First Nation Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Fall 2006). Pesantubbee specializes in Southeastern Native American religious traditions, Native American women and religion, and Native American religious movements. She serves on the program committee of the American Academy of Religion and is cochair of the women and religion section of the American Academy of Religion.

Tamar Ross


Tamar Ross has been a tenured member of the faculty at Bar Ilan University until her retirement this year. Her areas of interest and expertise include contemporary issues in traditionalist Jewish thought, including the challenge of feminism, historicism, biblical criticism, and postmodernity; Jewish theology, concepts of God, and revelation; religious epistemology; mysticism; the Musar movement, a Jewish movement of ethics and pietism; philosophy of halakha, or Jewish law; hermeneutics; and the thought of Rabbi A.I. Kook. She was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and has been a visiting scholar at various universities in Israel, South Africa, and the United States, most recently as Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Visiting Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Yale University in 2004–2005. Ross has published over 60 articles in scholarly journals and anthologies and one book, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (New England University Press, 2004), and has taught Jewish thought at the first women’s Yeshiva in Israel, Midreshet Lindenbaum, since its inception in 1976. Born in Detroit, Ross emigrated to Israel after high school and completed a PhD in Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She is married to philosopher Jacob J. Ross, and they have seven children and 22 grandchildren.

Barbara Ruch


Barbara Ruch is professor emerita of Japanese literature and culture at Columbia University and director of the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies. She earned her MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and her PhD from Columbia University in 1965, specializing in medieval Japanese literature. She joined Columbia University in 1984, after being on the faculties of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1986, she founded Columbia’s Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture. Since 1993, she has directed the Research and Restoration Project in the thirteen remaining Imperial Buddhist Convents of Kyoto and Nara and heads the Kyoto Medieval Japanese Studies Institute. She is the first non-Japanese to receive the Aoyama Nao Prize for Women’s History (1992) for her book in Japanese, Mô hitotsu no chûsei zô (Another Perspective on Medieval Japan, Shibundo, 1991). Among other awards, she received the Yamagata Banto Prize in 2000, the Ninth Cultural Bridge Award in 2006, and the 42nd Bukkyo Dendo Cultural Award in 2008, which was the first time this prize was awarded to a woman. The Imperial Order of the Precious Crown, with Butterfly Crest, was conferred on her by the Japanese Government in 1999. In 2002, she published the multi-authored, Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), the first book in a Western language on this subject. She is the founding organizer of Columbia University’s Gagaku Classical Japanese Music Curriculum and Performance Program.

Eve M. Troutt Powell


Eve M. Troutt Powell is an associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 2006. She is the author of A Different Shade of Colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the Mastery of the Sudan (University of California Press, 2003) and the coauthor with John Hunwick of The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2002). In 1999–2000, Troutt Powell was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and In 2003, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2005–2006. In 1995, Troutt Powell earned her doctorate in history and Middle East studies at Harvard University, where she also earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and she spent the next decade teaching at the University of Georgia.

Amina Wadud


Amina Wadud, a professor of Islamic studies, has been a visiting research scholar at the Starr King School for the Ministry—which is part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California—since 2006. She is the author of Qur’an and Woman: Re-Reading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (Fajar Bakti, 1992), which has been translated into six languages. Her latest book, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (Oneworld Publications, 2006), includes personal narratives and critical analysis about the intersection of pro-faith, pro-feminist methodologies in the relationship between theory and praxis. While inspired to work on issues of justice and faith by her father, a Methodist minister during the civil rights movement, she chose to practice Islam in 1972. She recently learned of her Muslim slave ancestry on her mother's side. Wadud earned her BS from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA and PhD from the University of Michigan.

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