Kimberly Hill

Ph.D. Student

Major Field: U.S. History

Other Fields: American South; Race Relations; Christianity

Advisor: W. Fitzhugh Brundage

Research Interests: I research the ways that American Christians have changed their definitions of racism and their methods to ameliorate this problem since the end of the Civil War. My master's thesis examined how one of the greatest Southern Baptist female missionaries, Martha Foster Crawford (ministering in China in the mid nineteenth century), combined rhetoric of female equality with racially driven attempts to subordinate female converts.

I am currently planning a dissertation that compares three missionary women's attempts to advance racial equality through missions to China, the northern U.S., and Congo between the 1869 and 1915. My three examples come from the lives of Martha Foster Crawford, Amanda Berry Smith, and Maria Fearing. Their racial perspectives vary because of their different denominations and social status (Smith and Fearing were born as slaves but Crawford was born into a slaveowning family). But they are linked by decades-long devotion to interaction with people of another race and willingness to leave familiar circumstances to achieve that goal. Moreover, all three contended with their denominations' contraints on female ministry and with prevalent assumptions that women best embodied and taught identity (in a cultural and racial sense). I look forward to spending the next two years wrestling with these topics as I get fully acquainted with these remarkable missionary women.