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McLester Seminar: Judith Weisenfeld – Spiritual Madness
February 22, 2023 @ 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
UNC Department of Religious Studies: McLester Seminar
February 22, 2023 at 3:30 p.m.
Anne Queen Lounge, Campus Y
Judith Weisenfeld (Princeton University) on “Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry, and African American Religions”
This talk will explore late nineteenth and early twentieth-century psychiatric theories about race, religion, and the ‘normal mind’. It will demonstrate how white asylum doctors drew on works from popular and scientific racial discourse as well as History of Religions scholarship to make racialized claims about African Americans’ ‘traits of character, habit, and behavior.’
The event is co-sponsored by UNC Departments of History, American Studies, and African, African American, and Diaspora Studies as well as the Carolina Seminar on Theory and Religion and the Duke University Department of Religious Studies.
