Beth Stroud is a PhD candidate in the Religion in the Americas subfield. Her dissertation, “A Loftier Race: Liberal Protestants and Eugenics, 1870-1930,” focuses on ideas about race, class, and reproduction among theologically liberal Protestants in the post-Civil War and Progressive eras. She argues that eugenic ideas drove changes in religious practice, especially in the areas of charity, moral instruction for young people, marriage, and the treatment of the infant body.
While completing her dissertation, Beth is working as a Research Fellow for ACPE, Inc., an organization that provides clinical training programs for spiritual care professionals of any faith and in any setting. As a Research Fellow, she is collaborating with principal investigators Wendy Cadge (Brandeis University) and George Fitchett (Rush University Medical Center) on a national study of education and training for health care chaplaincy. Additionally, she mentors first-generation and low-income Princeton undergraduates through the university’s Scholars Institute Fellows Program.
Beth was a Graduate Student Fellow at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Religion from 2011 through 2017, and has also held the Graduate Prize Fellowship at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values. She has co-authored a chapter in Faith on the Avenue (Oxford, 2013), Dr. Katie Day’s study of nearly 100 congregations on a single city street in Philadelphia. She helped design and teach the first religion course for Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative.
Beth holds an S.T.M. from The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York, and an A.B. from Bryn Mawr College.