Scripture, Authority, Identity, and Agency
Panel discussion.
This panel will consider how Protestant women derive authority, identity, and agency through their engagement with scripture and Christian doctrine. It will do so by considering specific examples of such engagement — the various ways that Protestant women of the past and present have expressed their religious ideas and perspectives, whether through literature, political activism, prophecy, or bible translation. The panel will also look at how these categories (authority, identity, and agency) are differently inflected by race, caste, and class in different historical contexts
For details of the event, please visit:
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/networks/protestant-women/#1-programme-2026-2027
About the network
Protestant Women and the Making of Global Religious Worlds investigates whether the category ‘Protestant woman’ functions in an analytically coherent way across diverse historical and cultural contexts, particularly against the backdrop of Protestantism’s centre shifting from the Northern Hemisphere to the Global South and East.
Through twelve sessions, the network takes the Protestant emphasis on the Bible as its starting point for conceptualising the study of the ‘Protestant woman’. The network engages with – and critically challenges – established typological labels that are applied to Protestant women, such as the missionary, the pastor’s wife, the deaconess, and the philanthropist. It asks whether alternative frameworks are required to research the ‘Protestant woman’ in politics, media, everyday life, and other subfields of inquiry, all while addressing the inherent tensions rooted in diverse interpretations of scripture that complicate the category itself. Ultimately, the network seeks to develop new methodologies for globally locating, interpreting, and making accessible Protestant women’s archival records that remain dispersed and fragmentary.
For details of the network and event, please visit:
https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/networks/protestant-women/
For general enquiries or if you have any accessibility needs, please email: networks@crassh.cam.ac.uk