by Judith Weisenfeld (Princeton University)
Wednesday, 10/9 at 4:30pm (STEPS 101)
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, white American psychiatrists declared that mental illness among African Americans in the South had reached alarming proportions and argued that, in a notable percentage of these cases, “religious excitement” was the key precipitating factor. This talk explores late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind” and shows how the emerging specialty of psychiatry drew on works from history of religions to make racialized claims about African Americans’ “traits of character, habit, and behavior.” This history of the intersections of psychiatry and African American religions sheds light on how ideas about race, religion, and mental normalcy shaped African American experience in courts and mental hospitals and on the role the racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.
Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and Chair of the Department of Religion at Princeton University. She is Associated Faculty in the Department of African American Studies, the Department of History, and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and serves on the Executive Committee of the Effron Center for the Study of America.
A scholar of African American religious history, her books include 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). Her forthcoming book, Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake, will be published by New York University Press in April 2025.
She currently directs The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures, which is supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.