Associated Projects
2011 Lived Theology Summer Fellow:
Valerie C. Cooper is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. She received her doctorate from Harvard Divinity School and both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Howard University. In her research and teaching, Dr. Cooper examines issues of religion, race, and society. Her book, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans, forthcoming from University of Virginia Press, analyzes the role of biblical interpretation in the work of Maria Stewart, a pioneering nineteenth-century African American woman political speaker. She and political scientist Corwin Smidt have just completed an essay on the role of religion and race for “Righteousness and Justice”: Religion, Barack Obama, and the 2008 Election, a text now under review by Columbia University Press.
Research:
My plans for this summer writing grant include continuing to work on three chapters for my next book, Down at the Crossroads: Evangelicals and Racial Reconciliation from the 1990s to the Present. Ultimately, the broader book project will include ethnographic and biographical elements with scholarly insights in a text that I hope will engage a wide audience of academics and practitioners in answering this basic question: why is the church in America still segregated? What, if anything, can be done to move the church in America beyond its racial and ethnic segregation to become a fully-inclusive body?
2010 Undergraduate Thesis Project:
A New Yorker born and raised, Cristina Liebolt was a fourth year Echols’s Scholar pursuing a triple major in Interdisciplinary Studies, English, and French when she received a Small Research Grant. The grant subsidized a research trip for her senior thesis, which compared a non-theological American community with a theological one, namely the secular, artistic Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina and the intentional, Christian Koinonia Farm in Americus, Georgia.
Read her project report.
View her project photos.
Outside of her academic work, Cristina escapes from the depths of the library stacks to the Blue Ridge Mountains where she hikes and skis.