Spirituality Madness: Race, Psychiatry, and African American Religions

February 24, 2022 -
6:30pm to 8:30pm

Judith Weisenfeld, PhD
Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion
​Princeton University

Abstract: This talk will explore late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the “normal mind.” It will demonstrate 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 how the role of racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.

Co-sponsored by the Program in African American Studies and the Health Humanities Project of Boston College

Location and Address

Online