Parks-King Lecture: Dr. Marla Frederick, “The Promise and Precarity of Black Institutions: Historical Pasts, Ethnographic Presents, and Collective Futures”

 Dr. Marla Frederick, an ethnographer whose scholarship focuses on the African American religious experience, will give Yale Divinity School’s annual Parks-King Lecture on Thursday, January 18.
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The lecture will take place at 5:30 p.m. in Niebuhr Hall. The lecture this year will follow an interview format, with Dr. Frederick responding to questions from YDS faculty member Todne Thomas, Associate Professor of Divinity and Religious Studies.
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Earlier on the 18th, Dr. Frederick will take part in a panel commemorating the 20th anniversary of her book Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith. Todne Thomas and Braxton Shelley of the YDS faculty will make opening and closing remarks. Other panelists will be announced closer to the event. The panel will run from 12:15 p.m. to 2 p.m. (location TBA) with 45 minutes allotted for Q&A with students. Lunch will be served.
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Marla Frederick is currently the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Religion and Culture at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. She will be Dean of Harvard Divinity School as of January 1. Before joining the Candler faculty, she served on the Harvard faculty from 2003 to 2019, including as an assistant professor in the Department of African and African American Studies, with a joint appointment on the Committee on the Study of Religion. In 2008, she was named the Morris Kahn Associate Professor, becoming tenured two years later.
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Dr. Frederick employs an interdisciplinary approach to examining the ways religion, race, and politics impact everyday lives. Her influential scholarship is principally focused on the study of religion and media, religion and social activism in the U.S. South, and the sustainability of Black institutions in a “post-racial” world. She is the author or co-author of four books, including Between Sundays and Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global. She is general editor of an encyclopedia of the histories of historically Black colleges and universities. She has taught courses on the anthropology of religion; religion, gender, and race; the African American experience; and American evangelicalism.
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Originally from Sumter, S.C., Dr. Frederick earned her bachelor’s degree from Spelman College and her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke University.
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Yale Divinity School’s Parks-King Lectureship commemorates two civil rights activists, Mrs. Rosa Parks and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was established in 1983 through the efforts of the Yale Black Seminarians. The lecture brings the contributions of African American scholars, social theorists, pastors, and social activists to YDS and to the larger New Haven community.