Dean Marla F. Frederick

Dean of Harvard Divinity School
John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity
Professor of Religion and Culture
Professor of African and African American Studies (FAS)

Marla Frederick is a leading ethnographer and scholar focused on the African American religious experience. She became the eighteenth Dean of Harvard Divinity School on January 1, 2024.

Frederick employs an interdisciplinary approach to examining the ways religion, race, and politics impact our everyday lives. Her influential scholarship is principally focused on the study of religion and media, religion and social activism in the U.S. South, and the sustainability of Black institutions in a “post-racial” world.

From 2019 to 2023, Frederick served as the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Religion and Culture at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. She served on the Harvard faculty from 2003 to 2019, including as an assistant professor in the Department of African and African American Studies, with a joint appointment on the Committee on the Study of Religion. In 2008, she was named the Morris Kahn Associate Professor and then as a tenured professor in 2010.

In addition to her faculty appointments at Harvard, Frederick served in a variety of leadership roles, including as interim chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion, a member of the provost’s academic leadership forum, and as director of graduate studies and chair of the admissions committee for the Department of African and African American Studies.

She is the author or co-author of four books, including Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global and Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith. As general editor, she is currently curating, alongside five co-editors, an encyclopedia of the histories of historically Black colleges and universities. She has taught courses on the anthropology of religion; religion, gender, and race; the African American experience; and American evangelicalism.

Frederick was the 2008-09 Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In 2016, she received a Harvard College Professor Distinguished Teaching Award. She also served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2021 and has been president of the Association of Black Anthropologists.