Judith Weisenfeld

Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University and Associate Faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. A specialist in early twentieth-century African American religious history, her work has focused on religion and constructions of race, African American women’s religious history, and religion in film and popular culture. She is the author 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, 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). She co-edited This Far by Faith: Readings in African American Women’s Religious Biography (Routledge, 1995) and is a co-author of The History of Riverside Church in the City of New York (NYU, 2004). In 1997, Professor Weisenfeld founded The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History, the first journal devoted to African American religious history and one of the earliest online open-source journals in Religious Studies, and served as editor until 2005. She is also a former co-editor of the journal Religion & American Culture and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Africana Religions. Her work has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Henry Luce Foundation for The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures, which she directs.