Marla Frederick

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Marla Frederick is an associate professor of African and African American studies and of the study of religion at Harvard University. She is the author of Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (University of California Press, 2003), and her current research interests include questions emerging from the intersections of religion, race, and media.

While at Radcliffe, Frederick will complete work on an ethnography that aims to understand how African American and African-descended producers, distributors, and consumers of religious broadcasting approach and make meaning of mediated religion. She will address concerns related to the rise of prosperity ministries in poor communities, as well as the dramatic rise of African American religious broadcasters on television. She is also coauthoring, with the anthropologists John Jackson and Carolyn Rouse, a manuscript titled “Televised Redemption,” which examines the role of race in the history and development of various forms of religious broadcasting.

Frederick earned her bachelor’s degree from Spelman College and her PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University. She has served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University and participated in the Womanist Scholars Program at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. She is a coauthor of Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics (New York University Press, 2007), which won the 2008 Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA) Book Award.