Marcia Robinson Assistant Professor Office: 511 Hall of Languages Phone: 315-443-5726 mrobin03@syr.edu

Professor Robinson specializes in the history of Western Christian thought and culture, with an emphasis on 19th-Century Europe and America. Her research focuses upon theological anthropology and aesthetics; religion, culture, and identity; and religion and art. These interest converge in her study of Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish religious thinker and poet; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an African-American poet, abolitionist, and activist; Henry O. Tanner, an African-American religious painter; and Benjamin Tucker Tanner, an African Methodist Episcopal bishop, biblical scholar and church historian.

Christianity
Women, Abolition and Religion in 19th-century America
Themes 19th-Century Religious Thought
Modern Religious Thought
Kierkegaard Seminar

• Ph.D., Religion (History of Christian Thought), Emory University (2001)
• M.A., Religion (History of Christian Thought), Emory University (1986)
• Enrolled in the Religion and Art M.A./Ph.D. Program, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (1988-1989)
• B.A., Classics, Concentration in Latin, Minor in Studio Art and Art History, Georgia State University (1987)

• Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, 2002-present.
• Visiting Instructor, University of California-Davis, Davis, CA, Spring 2002.
• Adjunct Instructor, American Baptist Seminary of the West, Berkeley, CA, Spring 2002.
• Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA.
• Assistant Professor of Church History, Eden Theological Seminary, St. Louis, MO, 1996-1999.

• "The Noblest Types of Womanhood": Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the White Anti-Slavery Women of Maine. Under review.

• “Tieck: Kierkegaard’s ‘Guadalquivir’ of Open Critique and Hidden Appreciation.” In Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries: Literature and Aesthetics, Vol. 6, Tom e III, Section One (Sources), Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception, and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, 271-314. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 2008.
• Review of Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 416 pp., in Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 11, no. 4 (December 2007).
  [database online]
• “Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.” In Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People, ed. H. H. Price and Gerald E. Talbot, 265-266, 356. Gardiner, ME: Tilbury House Publishers and the University of Southern Maine, 2006.
• “Religion.” In Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History: The Black Experience in the Americas, ed. Colin Palmer et al, 1909-1922. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, MacMillan Reference USA, 2006. Substantial revision of essay originally written by Milton C. Sernett.
• “Schiller” and “Play Impulse.” In The Edinburgh Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, ed. Jon Protevi, 518-519, 453-454, respectively. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
• Review of The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading By the Rule of Faith, by Timothy Houston Polk (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 232pp., in Kierkegaardiana 23 (2004): 231-235.
• “Hope Baptist Church.” An ethnographic narrative of an African-American Church in Atlanta. In Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Congregation and Community, 229-232. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

• “Blues Aesthetics: Cornel West as a Reader of Kierkegaard.” Article comm issioned for Kierkegaard’s Influence on Social-Political Thought, Vol. 14, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources (Ashgate, forthcoming); currently being prepared for submission in early August 2009.

• “Ars Divina: Kierkegaard’s Conception of Christian Poetic Living.” Doctoral dissertation, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 2001. Currently being revised as a book manuscript.

• “The Wonder of Christianity: A Study of Søren Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments.” Unpublished Master's thesis, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 1991.

• “Frances Watkins, Anti-Slavery, and Free-Soil Republicanism in 1850s Maine.” A Paper presented on the panel, Women, Politics, and Violence in the Anti-Slavery Movement, 14th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 12-15, 2008, Minneapolis, MN.
• “Black Moses, Black Christ: Religion, Race, and Heroism in the Journalistic Literature of Frances E. W. Harper.” A Paper presented in the session, American Heroes, Race(d) Heroes, and Erased Heroes in the Early Black Press, American Studies Association, October 11, 2007.
• “Writing Women’s Religious History from a Responsible Feminist and Womanist Perspective.” Copresentation with Margaret Susan Thompson, New Feminist Scholarship Series, Women Studies Program, Syracuse University, April 25, 2007.
• “Frances Harper, Søren Kierkegaard, and the Complex Mirror of Identity.” A Paper presented at the“Tragic Vision: The Aesthetic Dimension of American Religious Consciousness” Symposium, Graduate Theological Union, April 20-22, 2006, San Anselmo, CA.
• “Kierkegaard’s Conception of Poetic Living: Aesthetic Unity and Religious-Ethical Life-View in the Journals and Dissertation.” A Paper presented at the Fifth International Kierkegaard Conference, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, June 11-15, 2005, Northfield, MN.
• “The Black Mother as Moses-Christ: A Reading of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy.” A Paper presented to the Pan-African/ Womanist Group, Western Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, March 23, 2003, Davis, CA.
• “Review of Timothy Houston Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading By the Rule of Faith (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997). A paper presented to the Søren Kierkegaard Society, Book Panel, American Academy of Religion, Annual Meeting, November 17, 2001, Denver, CO.
• “Kierkegaard and “The Other”: The Danish Dialogical Thinker.” A Paper co-authored with Edward F. Mooney and presented to the Pacific Coast Theological Society, Graduate Theological Union, November 3, 2001, Berkeley, CA.
• “Ars Divina: Kierkegaard’s Conception of Christian Poetic Living.” An abstract of a doctoral dissertation presented to the Dissertation Panel, Fourth Annual Kierkegaard Conference, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong Kierkegaard Library, St. Olaf College, June 9-13, 2001, Northfield, MN.
• “Kierkegaard on Creation, Incarnation, and Irony: Through Fichte to Romantic and Christian Poetic Living.” A Paper presented to the Theology and Philosophy of Religion Section, Western Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, March 12, 2001, Claremont, CA.
• “Frances Harper: A 19th-century African-American Interpreter of Scripture.” A Paper presented to the Gender Issues Section, Central States Society for Biblical Literature, Joint Regional Meeting of the Midwest American Academy of Religion and the Central States Society for Biblical Literature, March 20, 1999, St. Louis, MO.
• “Anticipating the Self Before God: The Lily of the Field as Worshiper of God.” A Paper presented to the Kierkegaard, Religion and Culture Group, American Academy of Religion, Annual Meeting, November 23, 1997, San Francisco, CA.

• Organized and Facilitated “Despair, Evil, and Human Suffering: A Conversation between Kierkegaard and Black Theology,” session co-sponsored by the Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Group and the Black
  Theology Group, Annual Meeting, American Academy of Religion, Philadelphia, PA, November 19-20, 2005.
• Co-Chair and Member, Program Committee, Kierkegaard, Religion, and Culture Group, American Academy of Religion, 1998-2006.
• Digitized images of the Portland (Me) Inquirer, 1853-1855, for the Research Library of the Maine Historical Society in Portland, ME, as an extension of research on Frances E. W . Harper, 2004-2006.
• Initiated, co-organized, conducted, and facilitated with Joanne Silverstein, then Director of Research and Development, Information Institute, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, and the staff of the Maine Historical Society Research Library a cataloguing and indexing program for the digitized images of the Portland (Me) Inquirer, July 2006-June 2007.