Katharine Gerbner, Ph.D., will discuss the origins of modern racial categories, American slave societies and the integration of African religious practices in Christianity during a webinar at 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, April 13.

After a brief introduction to these topics, Dominique Stewart will interview Gerbner about these and other issues covered in her recently published book “Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World.”

This event, jointly sponsored by the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning at Saint John’s University and the  Jay Phillips Center for Interreligious Studies at the University of St. Thomas, is free and open to the public. The link to join the webinar, which will last one hour, can also be found on the webpage for this event.

A question and answer session open to viewers will follow the interview.

Gerbner, who earned her Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard University, is the McKnight Land Grant Professor and associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses in early American history, the Atlantic world, the history of race and global Christianity.

Among Gerbner’s publications are “Theorizing Conversion: Christianity, Colonization, and Consciousness in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” and “‘They Call Me Obea’: German Moravian Missionaries and Afro-Caribbean Religion in Jamaica”.

Stewart is completing his undergraduate studies at St. Thomas, where he has been awarded two interreligious research fellowships by the Jay Phillips Center. During the 2019-20 academic year, he examined early encounters of Hindu communities in Jamaica with the early Rastafari movement, and this academic year he has been investigating Caribbean identity through interreligious encounters in West Indian francophone literature.

This webinar is supported by a generous grant from the Jay and Rose Phillips Family Foundation of Minnesota.