R3 Contributor to Serve as Visiting Professor

R3 Contributor to Serve as Visiting Professor May 7, 2013

R3 Contributor Edward J. Blum will serve as a visiting professor at Memphis Theological Seminary. His class, “The Contested Colors of Christ in America,” examine issues of race and religion throughout American history through how Americans have considered the body and race of Jesus Christ. It begins with the transatlantic encounter of western Europeans, western Africans, and Native Americans and proceeds to the present-day of television, digital media, and global U.S. power. Moreover, the course highlights the power of slavery, land disputes, immigration, social movements, and law in American religious thinking and expression. “The Contested Colors of Christ in America” compels students to consider the social, cultural, and technological factors that have influenced and continue to influence views of Jesus, God, and religion in the lives of Americans past and present.

The class will meet June 3-7 from 9:00am-5:00pm in room C-101 at Memphis Theological Seminary. For more information call 901-458-8232. 

More of Professor Blum:


Edward J. Blum (University of Kentucky, 2003) is a historian of race and religion in the United States. He is the author (with Paul Harvey) of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007), and Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005). He is also the co-editor (with Paul Harvey) of The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History (2012), (with Jason R. Young) The Souls of W. E. B. Du Bois: New Essays and Reflections (2009), and (with W. Scott Poole) Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction (2005)

Blum has been awarded the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities by the Council of Graduate Schools for the best first book by a historian published between 2002 and 2009 (2009), the Peter Seaborg Award for the best book in Civil War Studies (2006), and the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in southern history (2004). Twice he has been recognized by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights and in 2007 was named by the History News Network a “top young historian.” He has been a fellow with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and with the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the classroom, Blum engages the past in a variety of ways, whether through music and images or debates and historical simulations. His courses include Antebellum America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, American religious history, and history through biography. He is a co-editor of the teaching blog and with Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman and Jon Gjerde of Major Problems in American History.


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