Marla Faye Frederick[1][2] is an American ethnographer and scholar, with a focus on the African American religious experience. Her work addresses a range of topics including race, gender, religion and media studies.[3] She became the eighteenth Dean of Harvard Divinity School on January 1, 2024.[4]
Frederick earned a BA in English from Spelman College and in 2000, earned a PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University.[5][6] She was a postdoctorate fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.[7]
Frederick was an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati.[5] She has been a visiting professor at the Interdenominational Theological CenterinAtlanta and at Northwestern University.[5][8]
In the early 2000s and 2010s, Frederick was Assistant Professor of Religion and African-American StudiesatHarvard University.[9][2][8] In 2008, she was the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.[7]
Frederick became the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Religion and Culture at the Candler School of TheologyatEmory University in 2019.[5][10]
Frederick has served as the President of the Association of Black Anthropologists.[11] Frederick was the president of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in 2021.[12][13]
On August 24, 2023, Harvard University announced that Frederick would become Dean of Harvard Divinity School on January 1, 2024.[14]
Frederick's first book Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (University of California Press, 2003), an ethnography of black church womeninHalifax County, North Carolina, was praised by reviewers; the review in Contemporary Sociology described it as a work that "puts a human face on so many sociological concepts and categories."[15][9]
In 2007, Frederick participated in a seven-author collaborative project in which scholars embedded themselves in North Carolina communities and observed how American democracy functioned in an "ordinary" community beyond just the act of voting.[2] The resulting book was Local Democracy Under Siege Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics, which won the 2008 Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA) Book Prize.[16][17]
Her first book on the relationship between television and religion was Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global (Stanford University Press, 2015).[18][8] In 2016, Frederick co-authored Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment with Carolyn Moxey Rouse and John L. Jackson Jr.[19]
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