Valerie C. Cooper is Associate Professor of Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School.
"Cooper's work stuns as a refreshing take on Stewart's
contributions to America's long enduring conversations on matters
of race and gender."--Jermaine Thibodeaux "The Journal of Southern
Religion"
"This book is essential for nineteenth-century historians
interested in how activists understood their role in American
society. It is also an important book for scholars involved in
gender analysis."--Rita Roberts, Scripps College
Cooper (Univ. of Virginia) examines Maria Stewart as an evangelical
preacher and theologian whose intricate life and brief career as a
public lecturer can only be fully understood by attending to the
biblical imaginary.... Cooper ably situates Stewart amid other
African American evangelical women like Jarena Lee and Sojourner
Truth to produce a very useful and attentive study of an important
figure in 19th-century religious history.-- "CHOICE"
Maria Stewart's work is shot through with biblical nuances and
references that only someone with strong biblical knowledge and
expertise within the field of African American religious history
can tackle. Given Prof. Cooper's expertise in both areas, she has
the ability to synthesize and interpret the work of Maria Stewart
in a way no other scholar has done yet. She provides a fresh and
original look at the work of Maria Stewart.--Albert G. Miller,
Oberlin College, author of Elevating the Race: Theophilus G.
Steward, Black Theology, and the Making of an African American
Civil Society, 1865-1924
With this book Valerie Cooper joins a growing number of scholars
who have found significant historical riches in studying the
religious lives of ordinary African Americans. Her careful editing
of an important 1831 essay from the little-known Maria W. Stewart,
along with her own careful historical investigation of Stewart and
sensitive interaction with up-to-date scholarship on African
American engagement with the Bible, make this an unusually
well-rounded effort. The book illuminates both the historical world
of Maria Stewart and the latest debates on the religious lives of
black Americans. This is a fine book.--Mark A. Noll, University of
Notre Dame
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