Date/Time
Date(s) - October 29, 2025
6:30 pm
Location
Loranger Architecture Exhibition Space
The 2025 Bruttell Endowment for Social Ethics presents “Black Freedom, Religious Excitement, and the Invention of a Public Health Crisis,” a lecture by Judith Weisenfeld, Ph.D., the Agate Brown and George L. Collard Professor of Religion at Princeton University.
This event will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 29, at 6:30 p.m., in the Architecture Exhibition Space, inside the Loranger Architecture Building. The talk is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be available.
Weisenfeld will examine the rise of mental institutions as public institutions in the late 19th Century and the increasing prominence of a racialized understanding of “religious excitement” as a public health crisis that served as justification for the institutionalization of the formerly enslaved and their descendants.
Weisenfeld’s research and teaching focus on African American religious history, religion and race, and religion in modern American culture. She is the author most recently of Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and American Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake and New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, which was awarded the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions. She is also the director of The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Cultures, and Communities, which is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and supported by Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion.
For any questions, please contact Chair of the Department of Religious Studies Todd Hibbard at hibbarja@udmercy.edu.
The event is co-sponsored by University of Detroit Mercy College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, the African American Studies Program and the Department of Religious Studies.
Register here.
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