Judith Weisenfeld joined the Princeton faculty in 2007. Her research and teaching focus on African American religious history, religion and race, and religion in modern American culture. She is the author of Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929-1949 and African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905-1945. Her most recent book, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration, was awarded the 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions. Her current research examines the intersections of psychiatry, race, and African American religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John S. Guggenheim foundation. She is also the Director of The Crossroads Project: Black Religious Histories, Cultures, and Communities, which is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and supported by Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion.

In addition to her appointment in Religion, she is affiliated with the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies and serves on the Executive Committee of the Effron Center for the Study of America. Professor Weisenfeld received the 2020 Graduate Mentoring Award for the Humanities from the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning and a 2023 Faculty Champion Award for the Best of Access, Diversity, and Inclusion from Princeton’s Graduate School. She currently serves as Chair of the Department of Religion.