The Divinity School and The Marty Center are pleased to announce the appointment of Curtis J. Evans, Associate Professor of Religions in America and the History of Christianity, as Marty Center Faculty Co-Director. Evans’ appointment will begin on July 1, 2023.

Faculty Co-Directors are Divinity School faculty who advance the Marty Center’s engagement with the university community and broader public. During a three-year appointment, they collaborate with staff on the weekly publication of Sightings, a digital magazine about religion and current affairs, and oversee the sponsorship of faculty-led conferences and events. Co-directors also lead the annual Marty Seminar Junior Fellowship program for dissertation-stage Divinity School PhD students.

“We are very excited about the leadership and experience Professor Evans will bring to the Marty Center’s developing programming,” Robinson said. “His unparalleled knowledge of American history, African American history, and especially the history of African American religion, in its many and diverse congregational and institutional forms, will add greater depth to research projects focused on local and contemporary subjects.”

Evans is an historian who focuses on modern American religion, particularly since the Civil War; race and religion in US history; and slavery and Christianity. His first book, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008), analyzes debates about the role of religion in the lives of African Americans and the origins of the scholarly category of "the Black church." His forthcoming publication, A Theology of Brotherhood: The Federal Council of Churches and the Problem of Race, combines many of his research interests: the FCC’s attempt at social and racial change from the 1920s to the 1940s, the evolution of theological reflections on race, and the concrete and particular circumstances that shape historical actors as they wrestle with the constraints of their social worlds. Evans’ work has appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Church History, Journal of Southern Religion, and Religion and American Culture and he is currently a contributing columnist for Sightings.

Evans expressed his excitement about the community engagement components of the Faculty Co-Director position.

“Serving as Faculty Co-Director of the Marty Center offers a unique opportunity to engage the diverse religious cultures of our neighborhood of Hyde Park and across the city of Chicago,” he said. “I look forward to working closely with the Marty Center team as we explore ways to connect the Divinity School to the wider public and to foster excellent scholarship that examines the role of religion in the pressing issues of our time.”

Evans will serve alongside Alireza Doostdar, Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion, and will succeed Willemien Otten, Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity, who has led the Marty Center as Faculty Director and later Co-Director since 2017. Otten’s tenure has seen the center’s growing emphasis on public-facing scholarship and community engagement, reflected in its renaming as the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion.

“Universities often have centers to strengthen their ties with the community and be less perceived as an ivory tower,” she wrote, reflecting on her time with the center. “The isolation of American universities is indeed a problem and the Marty Center is in an excellent position to build bridges to parts of Chicago that surround us, which all of us at the university have neglected doing for too long.”

Among other notable events Otten has led was the November 2022 conference The Contribution of Theology to Rationality, which honored the work of retiring French scholar Jean-Luc Marion and drew a packed room of theologians, philosophers, scholars of religion, and Marion fans from around the world. An upcoming public conference in April 2023, Science and Religion: From Conflict to Celebration, will be Otten’s final event as Faculty Co-Director.

“The Marty Center would not be where it is today without Willemien Otten’s many years of investment,” said Brie Loskota, Executive Director of the Marty Center. “She leaves a strong legacy of collaborative leadership that will be carried forward with this new team.”

As Faculty Co-Director, Evans hopes to continue his work on the relationship between religion and violence, including his service on the Hyde Park and Kenwood Interfaith Council Anti-Violence Task Force He is also interested in pursuing concerns related to religion and the environment and the development of a public archive of documents related to African American religion.