Jerald Brauer was Dean of the Divinity School from 1955 to 1970. 

An authority on Puritanism and the history of Christianity in America, he served on the school's faculty for 49 years, from 1950 until his death, and wrote and edited numerous books. Although he officially retired in 1991, he continued to teach a seminar on Christian history each semester.

In his role as dean,  Dr. Brauer recruited a group of famous scholars to Chicago, including the theologian Paul Tillich, the comparative religion specialist Mircea Eliade, the philosopher Paul Ricouer, the church historian Martin Marty and others.

Dr. Brauer initially served as dean of the university's Federated Theological Faculty, which included the divinity school and three other institutions, a union that dissolved in 1960. He received the appointment in April 1955, when he was just 33. 

Jerald C. Brauer was born in Fond du Lac, Wis., in 1921. After receiving bachelor's and ministerial degrees, he completed his doctorate in the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago divinity school in 1948. From 1948 to 1950, he taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he was an assistant to Mr. Tillich. For more than three decades, he was a co-editor of the quarterly journal Church History.

Ordained as a pastor in the Lutheran Church in America, which merged with two other denominations to create the Evangelical Lutheran Church, he retained a lifelong interest in issues affecting Lutheranism.