About

Katharine Gerbner is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research examines how religion shapes and is shaped by race, freedom, and technology, with a focus on religious practices that have been excluded from traditional definitions of religion. She develops multilingual archival strategies to uncover marginalized and forgotten stories, contributing to a deeper understanding of religious history and its intersections with race and colonialism. Gerbner is the author of two books: 'Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica' and 'Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World.' She is also the co-creator of the digital project 'Adga Tome: Damma’s World, From Gbe to Dutch Creole,' which translates the words of a formerly enslaved African woman. Her current research investigates the history of religious freedom, exploring how labor systems and emerging technologies have transformed definitions of religion and freedom from the First Amendment to the Age of AI. Dedicated to making historical research accessible, Gerbner has contributed to documentaries, podcasts, and op-eds, and works with educators to support curricular revision and media literacy in history and social studies education.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Religious studies
• Law
• Anthropology
• Art
• Ancient history
• Philosophy
• Criminology
• Theology
• Visual arts
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Ben Wright. <i>Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism</i>.

  The American Historical Review · 2023-07-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Ben Wright. Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. Get access Ben Wright. Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. x, 353. Cloth $45.00. Katharine Gerbner Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota Twin Cities, US Email: kgerbner@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 3, September 2023, Pages 1489, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad263 Published: 26 September 2023

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• The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh (review)

  Journal of the Early Republic · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Katharine Gerbner (bio) Keywords Slavery, Religion, Culture of dismemberment, Re/membrance, Protestantism, Christianity The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South. By Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth, $95.00, paper, $27.95). Enslaved women in the antebellum south inhabited a "triple consciousness," writes Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh in her groundbreaking new book, The Souls of Womenfolk. Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how bondwomen's intersectional [End Page 334] experiences as enslaved Black women with (re)productive demands led to "ontological ramifications and moral dilemmas" (2). Their triple consciousness should be recognized as the source of enslaved religious and ethical culture, with the "psyches of enslaved men and children" flowing from the bedrock of women's triple consciousness. In The Souls of Womenfolk, Wells-Oghoghomeh introduces several powerful interlocking concepts that help to narrate both the history of slavery and the history of religion in new, distinctive, and important ways. One foundational concept is the "culture of dismemberment," which serves as shorthand for the collective experiences of dislocation, familial separation, rape, and other forms of physical violence that formed the core of the transatlantic system of slavery. The culture of dismemberment also encompassed the system of capitalism that reduced people to profit, and fundamentally shaped the ways in which bodies were viewed and treated. For enslaved women, the culture of dismemberment had distinctive features, most notably the "resignification of the womb." Enslaved women recognized that their wombs were commodified in a transatlantic economic system that relied on their powers of reproduction. This resignifying process in the service of human capital forced women to wrestle with different existential questions than enslaved men, and their experiences formed the core of enslaved religious cultures. They asked existential and moral questions about how to respond to injustice and violation, how to protect themselves and their families, and how to build a life together and in community with others to mitigate the culture of dismemberment. Bondpeople's answer to dismemberment was "re/membrance," a creative and adaptable orientation that drew on West African precedents and responded to the challenges of the Americas (2). Re/membrance came in many forms, and each chapter in The Souls of Womenfolk elucidates varieties of re/membering practices, orientations, and beliefs. As mothers, enslaved women recognized that their wombs had become the producers of human capital, and this knowledge shaped the ways that they understood the cosmos, defined ethical priorities, and engaged existential questions. They also shaped child-rearing, as Black women aimed to protect themselves and their children from the violating effects of slavery and the culture of dismemberment. The orientation toward "re/membrance," and the values that flowed from it, are part of what Wells-Oghoghomeh calls "womb ethics," another [End Page 335] key theoretical formulation (71). Womb ethics encompassed enslaved women's definitions of what was good, just, right, and necessary, and they were flexible and adaptable. Womb ethics had no universalizing notions of what was correct or moral; they were oriented toward re/membrance, mitigation of violence and trauma, and improving the quality of life for oneself and one's kin. Womb ethics could encompass filicide as well as marronage or parental surrogacy. Crucially, the category of "re/membrance" helps to orient the narration of sexual violence and rape, a topic that Wells-Oghoghomeh attends to most directly in Chapter 3. Here, Wells-Oghoghomeh describes the distinctive and devastating culture of sexual dismemberment that enslaved women were born into, and into which they bore children. Justified by logics that impugned the morality of Black women, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how the idea of "sense," or "common sense," offered enslaved women a "mode of perception" that was "pragmatic and adaptable" (96). Sense could include dissembling, disremembering, and strategic silences that helped to preserve psychosocial survival in a dismembering culture. Wells-Oghoghomeh also shows how sexual choice became a sacred value, as did privacy and pleasure. Perhaps more than any other topic, the framework of re/membrance and womb ethics offers a way to write about the culture...

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• 14 Maroon Science: Knowledge, Secrecy, and Crime in Jamaica

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2023 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Criminology
  PublisherDOI

• Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, By Kathryn Gin Lum

  Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Religious studies
  • History

  Journal Article Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, by Kathryn Gin Lum Get access Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. By Kathryn Gin Lum. Harvard University Press, 2022. 368 pages. $35.00 (hardcover). Katharine Gerbner Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota kgerbner@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfad047, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad047 Published: 31 August 2023

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• 1 Rebellion and Religion: Slavery and Empire in Early America

  New York University Press eBooks · 2022-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• 1. Rebellion and Religion: Slavery and Empire in Early America

  New York University Press eBooks · 2022 · 13 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Ancient history
  PublisherDOI

• Archival Violence, Archival Capital: Ethics, Inheritance, and Reparations in the Thistlewood Diaries

  The William and Mary Quarterly · 2022-10-01 · 16 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In 2011, the Beinecke Library at Yale University purchased the Thomas Thistlewood Papers through a private sale. The collection, which includes nearly ten thousand pages written by Thistlewood, an English overseer and enslaver who lived in Jamaica from 1750 to 1786, has become one of the most important archival sources for understanding slaveholding culture and enslaved life in the British Atlantic world. Yet sources such as the Thistlewood diaries raise important ethical questions. Drawing on Black feminist critiques of the archive, especially Saidiya Hartman’s call to “acknowledge . . . our inheritance” from Thistlewood, this article uses the Thistlewood papers as a case study to examine the relationship between archives, ethics, and value. In considering “inheritance,” scholars should recognize not only the intellectual and psychic inheritance of Thistlewood’s diaries but also their material inheritance, including market value. The collection’s intellectual and monetary value has increased over time—largely because of the efforts of Caribbean archivists and scholars. Recognizing how the labor of historians, archivists, and other scholars can increase the monetary value of archival sources and enrich collectors and institutions creates new opportunities for reparative work.

  PublisherDOI

• Passing the Baton at the Journal of Early Modern History

  Journal of Early Modern History · 2021-08-09

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

  American Religion · 2020-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 186–188 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.18 Book Review Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA The word “religion” appears only seven times in Pablo Gómez’s extraordinary book, The Experiential Caribbean. Yet the paucity of references is, perhaps paradoxically, an indication that this brilliant study should be foundational to studies of American religion. Gómez, an historian of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written a book about healing and knowledge production that critiques the category of religion in practice, rather than in theory. The Experiential Caribbean explores the “healthcare marketplace” of the early modern Caribbean, focusing on Black ritual practitioners and health specialists. Goméz’s central argument, which is directed primarily at historians of science and medicine, emphasizes that these individuals were not merely “informers” who helped European collectors create the “New Science” of the seventeenth century. Instead, they were themselves responsible for an “experiential revolution ” that emphasized empirical knowledge production over “first principles” and tradition. While the category of “religion” is not Gómez’s central focus, his findings— and his argument—should be of interest to all scholars of American religion. The “ritual practitioners” and “health specialists” who are the focus of his book, after Katharine Gerbner 187 all, were called brujas, sorcerers, and witches by European authorities. In the archival records that Gómez explores, which include Inquisition records as well as a wide range of underutilized medical texts and recipe books, they are agents of “superstition” whose integration of Catholic rituals into their healing practices was suspect at best, and criminal at worst. Yet even as these practitioners were condemned by ecclesiastical authorities, they were widely sought out not only by Black and indigenous people in need of care, but also by Europeans, including church officials. Their integration of a wide range of material, ritual, and verbal practices proved to be effective and attractive within the competitive healthcare marketplace of the early modern Caribbean. Due to the fact that Black practitioners were marginalized as religious “others ” and excluded from histories of medicine, Gómez makes the conscious choice not to use religion-related terminology in his own narrative. Terms like “witch” and “shaman,” Gómez explains, “betoken the very language … used to condemn black ways of knowing” away from categories such as “rational” and “enlightened” (11–12). Instead, he opts for phrases like “ritual specialist” and “health specialist,” as well as Mohán, a term of Amerindian origin, to describe the Black healers who are the focus of his book. The first two chapters, “Arrivals” and “Landscapes,” set the stage and describe how Africans and their descendants made up the majority of the population in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. These individuals drew on African precedents and Amerindian examples as well as European traditions in order to create a “vibrant, if ruthless, cultural economy of healing and diseasing” (38). Implicit in Gómez’s description of this early modern world is a critique of traditional debates about African traditions in the Atlantic world, which tend to argue that Africans and their descendants either “retained” African culture or that they participated in a process of “creolization.” Gómez sidesteps this historiographical quagmire by arguing that Black practitioners gained expertise and authority through their travels. Chapter three, “Movement,” argues that in the competitive healthcare marketplace of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, incorporation was key to success , and healing traditions were not “enclosed” (85). In fact, the dislocation that characterized the seventeenth-century Caribbean weakened structures of power within the multiple healing and religious traditions in the region and “fostered the development of open, omnivorous epistemologies” (87). Significantly, Gómez also repositions the concept of movement away from the Atlantic, and towards interior mobility: the movement of ritual practitioners inland from cities like Cartageña on rivers and through diverse communities. On a related point, he critiques recent scholarship that has emphasized the transfer of knowledge solely from indigenous and Black practitioners to European collectors...

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 6 Writing Against Slavery Germantown, Quakers, and the Ethnic Origins of Early Antislavery Thought

  Penn State University Press eBooks · 2019-04-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Karin Vélez

  1 shared

• Giancarlo Casale

  European University Institute

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, History of American Civilization

  Harvard University

  2013

• BA, Religion

  Columbia University

  2006

Awards & honors

• McKnight Land Grant Professorship (2018 - 2020)