Recap: Prathia Hall Lecture Featuring Rev. Dr. Renita Weems

On March 3, Princeton Theological Seminary and its Center for Theology, Women, and Gender welcomed Rev. Dr. Renita Weems, PhD '89, MDiv '83, to deliver the Prathia Hall Lecture. Weems is the first African American woman to earn a PhD in Old Testament Studies at Princeton Seminary, and as she noted in her lecture, is also the first African American woman to earn a PhD in the field of Old Testament Studies.

Weems began her lecture by recounting her friendship with Hall, which budded from being fellow students in the Seminary’s PhD program, and the monumental impact of Hall’s life and work. Her lecture centered on the first generation of Womanist scholars and the challenges they faced: “We had to write Black women into our research and do the work as if Black women had always been there. We had to write and then serve as surrogate readers to our own work. And convince advisors and committees of the legitimacy of what we were doing. We had to invent ourselves and devised tools that helped with that invention.”

Watch or listen to “Learning to Think Better Than We Have Been Trained: Black Women and the Academic Study of Religion” below.