Affiliated Institutions

Harvard University

Marla Frederick is the author of Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith, a richly detailed ethnography exploring the complex lives and faith commitments of women in rural North Carolina. Her co-authored book, Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics, won the 2008 Best Book Award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Frederick's research interests include questions emerging from the intersections of religion, race, gender, media, politics and economics. She is currently completing an ethnography entitled, "Colored Television: Religion, Media and Racial Uplift in the Black Atlantic World." This work teases out a triangulated approach to understanding how African American and African descended producers, distributors and consumers of religious broadcasting approach and make meaning of mediated religion.

Areas of Research

Religion, Media, Race

Publications

Between Sundays: Black Women’s Everyday Struggles of Faith The University of California Press, 2003.

Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics. Co-Authored with Dorothy Holland, Donald Nonini, Catherine Lutz, Lesley Bartlett, Thad Guldbrandsen and Enrique Murillo. New York: NYU Press, 2007.

Neo-Pentecostalism and Globalization in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies. Edited by Robert A. Orsi (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).

Reading Race and American Televangelism in The Cambridge History of Religions in America: Volume III: 1945 to the Present. Edited by Stephen J. Stein. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).

Rags to Riches: Religion, Media, and the Performance of Wealth in a Neoliberal Age in Ethnographies of Neoliberalism. edited by Carol Greenhouse (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 2009).

Becoming Conservative. Becoming White?: Black Evangelicals and the Para-Church Movement.” with Traci Griffin in This Side of Heaven: Race,Ethnicity, and Christian Faith edited by Robert J. Priest and Alvaro L. Nieves. (Oxford University Press, 2007).

But It’s Bible’: African American Women and Televangelism in Women and Religion in the African Diaspora. edited by R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Savage (John Hopkins University Press, 2006).

The Marketization of Education: Public Schools for Private Ends with Lesley Bartlett, Thad Guldbrandsen, and Enrique Murrillo. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 33(1): 1-25, 2002.

Projects

Halifax, NC, United States

Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith

Kingston, Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica

Colored Television: Black Religion Gone Global