Religion & the Madhouse: Featuring Judith Weisenfeld

On this episode of Religion &, we invited scholars to engage in a wide-ranging conversation with Judith Weisenfeld on facets of her newest publication Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (NYU Press, 2025). Listen to our conversation with Dr. Judith Weisenfeld that unpacks Black religious beliefs, new religious movements, and “religious excitement” as a psychiatric concept in institutionalization.

Co-Host: Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds

Joseph L. Tucker Edmonds is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies at Indiana University Indianapolis and the Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies and Economics from Brown University, his Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and his PhD in Religious Studies from Duke University. His research interests are Black religion and the Black body, alternative Christianities, and the role of scripture in African and African American religious traditions. His book, The Other Black Church: Alternative Christian Movements and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Fortress, 2020), highlights the variety and vibrancy of the African American Christian sphere during the latter half of the twentieth century and it adds to the growing body of work that is addressing alternative Christian traditions in the Black public sphere.

Co-Host: Philippa Koch

Philippa Koch is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University. Her research and teaching center on religion, health, and society in America and its global context. Her recent publications include “Records of Relinquishment: Caregiving and Emotion in the Philanthropy Archive,” an article which appeared in The Public Historian in May 2024, as well as her first book, The Course of God’s Providence: Religion, Health, and the Body in Early America, which was published in 2021 by NYU Press. She is currently working on her next book, Medicine and American Religion, which is under contract with Routledge.

Featured Scholar: Judith Weisenfeld

Judith Weisenfeld is Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion and associated faculty in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. Her research focuses on early twentieth-century African American religious history, including the relation of religion to constructions of race, the impact on black religious life of migration, immigration, and urbanization, African American women’s religious history, religion in film and popular culture, and religion and medicine. She is the author of Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (NYU Press, 2025), New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (NYU 2016), which won the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (California 2007), and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905–1945 (Harvard 1997), as well as many articles and book chapters on topics in African American and American religious history and culture. Her current research focuses on the psychiatry, race, and Black religions in the late nineteenth and early 20th century United States.

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