We hope you will join us on December 6, 2022 at 8:00am for a virtual presentation via Zoom by Judith Weisenfeld, PhD on Spiritual Madness: Race, Psychiatry, and African American Religions. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Bioethics & Health Law, Department of Religious Studies, Jewish Studies Program, Palliative and Supportive Institute of UPMC, and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary Continuing Education Program

Dr. Weisenfeld is the Agate Brown and George L. Collord Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Her 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.” This history of the intersections of psychiatry and African American religions sheds light on how ideas about race, religion, and mental normalcy shaped African American experience in courts and mental hospitals and the role of racialization of religion played more broadly in the history of medicine, legal history, and the history of disability.

Register to Attend. Click here to register for this lecture and the Zoom link will be sent to you.

For More Information: Please contact the Center for Bioethics at bioethics@pitt.edu.