Stephanie Paulsell

Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies Emerita

617.496.3579

spaulsell@hds.harvard.edu

Education

BA, Greensboro College
MA, PhD, University of Chicago

Profile

Stephanie Paulsell has been a member of the HDS faculty since 2001. She is the author of Religion Around Virginia Woolf (2019), co-editor (with Davíd Carrasco and Mara Willard) of Goodness and the Literary Imagination (2019), and has served as a regular columnist for The Christian Century since 2007. Her work focuses on religion and literature, Christian spirituality, and the spiritually formative dimensions of the practices of reading and writing. Recent courses include “Virginia Woolf and Religion,” “Contemplative Prayer in Christianity,” “Emily Dickinson: ‘the extasy define—,’” “Seeking God: A History of Christian Spirituality in Twelve Lives," and a seminar on the twentieth-century monastic writer, Thomas Merton.

Paulsell’s other publications include Lamentations and the Song of Songs (co-authored with Harvey Cox, 2012), Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice (2002) and The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher (2001), co-edited with L. Gregory Jones. She is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and lives in Cambridge with her husband, Kevin Madigan, where they served as Faculty Deans of Eliot House in Harvard College from 2020 to 2024.

Full CV