Judith Weisenfeld

Judith Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University and associated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. After receiving her Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University in 1992, she taught at Barnard College and then at Vassar College before returning to Princeton in 2007.

She is a scholar of African American religious history with interest in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Black religious life and 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. Her earlier books include 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). Her current project is a study of race, African American religion, and psychiatry in late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S. She is the co-director, with Anthea Butler and Lerone Martin, of “The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities and Cultures,” which is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation.