Alumni Profiles Series: Marla Frederick

Dr. Marla Frederick received her B.A. from Spelman College before pursuing a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Duke. After graduating from Duke, she completed postdocs at Princeton University and the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC). She also served on faculty at the University of Cincinnati, Harvard University, and Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. Dr. Frederick is currently Dean of Harvard Divinity School. She is the first woman and only the second African American to serve in that role. Dr. Frederick’s research reflects the institutions that have deeply shaped and informed her life, the Black Church and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). She has authored or co-authored four books, including Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith, which developed from her dissertation. Dr. Frederick is currently working with five co-editors to develop an encyclopedia on the histories of HBCUs. 

Tell me about yourself.

I was born and raised in Sumter, South Carolina, to parents who were fiercely committed to education. My father, who grew up sharecropping in South Carolina, had a rare opportunity to attend Morris College, a historically Black college in Sumter, where the president, Dr. O. R. Reuben, allowed him to serve as his driver for four years in order to pay for college. He encouraged him to go to Atlanta University to earn his MBA, where he met my mother, who was working on her MBA. She's from Louisiana and had graduated from Southern University. They met in graduate school, and because my father committed to Dr. Reuben that he would come back to South Carolina to serve as business manager for Morris College after he graduated, they returned and started their family in Sumter. 

We were born and raised there, educated in Catholic school for a few years and then the public school system. Elementary, middle to high school, I was faithfully involved in the community. We attended First Baptist Missionary Church in Sumter, which was the church out of which Morris College came. When my parents joined, President Reuben and Mrs. Reuben were still alive and attended the church. (You will know the name Reuben because Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke integrated Duke, and you have a building there named after her. President and Mrs. Reuben were her parents.) My dad taught Wilhelmina how to drive a car as well as her siblings. Their family was instrumental in my father getting an education. We lived around the corner from Morris College. I feel like I grew up on the campus of Morris College and learned to value education because of my parents. 

When it was time for me to graduate high school, I could go to the University of South Carolina or to Spelman. I’d applied to only two places and had been admitted to both. My dad was like, “You can go anywhere and be successful. You know, you're smart and talented enough. You can go anywhere.” My mother, on the other hand, said as a matter of fact, “You need a historically Black college experience.” I decided to attend Spelman, and I think she was right. It was an extraordinary experience because growing up in South Carolina, there was never an assignment, kindergarten through senior year in high school, where I was assigned a book to read that was written by a Black person, not one time, which says something.

Going to Spelman was incredible, as you are immersed in Black women's history and literature from required convocations to the classroom experience itself. We took a freshman seminar course where we read Black women's literature. And it's not just Black women in the U.S.; we read Black women from around the world and their literature. I had these incredible Black women professors: Dr. Gloria Wade Gayles was my thesis advisor, and she encouraged me to pursue a Ph.D.

Sophomore year, I was in the honors program. They also had a program to prepare minorities for academic careers, much like the Mellon program, that I participated in, and that program was a partnership with several HBCUs and Duke University. Each student had an advisor from their school, and then during the summer, we would be partnered with a faculty member at Duke. We came to Duke and conducted research projects which we presented at the end of the summer and then continued to work on during our senior year. I was partnered with Dr. Karla Holloway at Duke, which is how I decided that I wanted to go to Duke for graduate school. She was phenomenal. 

I had long planned on going into law, into politics, going back to South Carolina, being a U.S. senator from South Carolina. I'd been in student government throughout high school and was selected to attend Girls State and then elected to Girls Nation. It was a clear path for me. But then when I was afforded the opportunity to pursue this Ph.D., I thought, “This could be really incredible.” When I talked to Dr. Gayles, she said, somewhat jokingly, but seriously, “We don't need any more Black lawyers. We need Black Ph.D.s, people who are going to create a pipeline for the next generation of Black scholars, people who are going to research and write the history of African Americans.” I took the LSAT AND the GRE, and I talked to Dr. Johnnetta Cole, who was president of the college at the time. I told her, “I think I want to go to graduate school and study anthropology,” because she, as president, taught one course per year, and she taught it on Wednesday evenings. It was the only anthropology course offered at the time. I registered for that class and I fell in love with anthropology. She was a thought-provoking lecturer. She co-taught it with Prof. Daryl White who was also tremendously supportive. From that, I decided this is what I want to do. I want to focus on cultural anthropology; I want to study Black women in the church. I decided to apply, and the rest is history. I had wonderful advisors at Duke, particularly in the persons of Charlie Piot and Lee Baker.

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What has your career path looked like since leaving Duke?

My first year out, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, which was incredibly helpful for me in preparing my dissertation to become a book. Then I taught at the University of Cincinnati for a year. I taught in African American Studies and realized during that year that I didn't want to earn tenure and live in the Midwest. I felt removed from my life in South Carolina and Georgia, even in the Northeast. I have a lot of family, but no one really out in Ohio. 

After that year, I applied for another postdoc at the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) at the Center for Black Women in Church and Society with Dr. Jacquelyn Grant. I was a postdoc there, and that allowed me a tremendous amount of time to polish up Between Sundays and prepare it for publication. 

After that, I came to Harvard. I started out here as an assistant professor in African and African American Studies and in the Committee on the Study of Religion, and that was a joint appointment. I was there from 2003 to 2019, moving from assistant professor to associate professor to full professor with tenure, and then I left here in 2019 and went to Emory University’s Candler School of Theology for four years.

In the spring of 2023, Alan Garber, who was provost at Harvard at the time, asked me if I had recommendations for the next dean of Harvard Divinity School (HDS). I gave him a list, and eventually he came back to me, and he said, “Marla, would you consider being dean, the next dean of Harvard Divinity School? Would you give it a thought?” I left Harvard because I wanted to be closer to my family and the wonderful opportunity at Emory allowed me to be back in Atlanta with so many influential scholars doing work in African American studies.

Dwight McBride was the provost [of Emory] at the time. He had this great vision of Emory being the center for the study of all things Black, all things related to the African American community because of the Civil Rights history in Atlanta and the unique history of the South in general. It just felt like a great moment to return. So, I told Alan I had not considered coming back, but I would think about it. 

He asked, “Would you talk to our advisory committee this summer?” And I said, “Sure!” It was about ten people or so on a Zoom meeting. They all had these really direct questions to ask me. When I got off the phone, I said, “Wow, that conversation went really well.” Long story short, by the end of the summer, I had signed on the dotted line and told Claudine [Gay, then-president of Harvard] that it would be an honor to come back to work with her and serve as the next dean of HDS starting January 1, 2024.

Did you find any surprises in the role that you didn’t anticipate?

There’s so much that I could say here given this moment in history, but I will stick with this one surprise that stood out to me—though perhaps not entirely unexpected given the spirit of HDS—it was just how deeply the community embodies multireligious understanding and empathy. For example, community members from different faith traditions organize and host a weekly Noon Service, allowing all in the HDS community to gather across the boundaries of many religious backgrounds. While I anticipated diversity in thought and tradition, I didn’t fully anticipate how sincerely people here strive to honor each other's lived experiences. That level of care and presence isn’t just heartwarming, it’s transformative.

Given all that is going on, what would you hope to see in the future of the academy?

We are a multiracial, multi-religious democracy. I believe the university and society are better when we have multiple voices, be they different racial and ethnic voices or different religious voices all at the table. And that's what makes this democratic ideal such a phenomenal experiment. It's just an incredible ideal that you could have all of these different people working together, solving problems, and thinking about what it means to live in community. Scholars from so many different backgrounds are doing the type of research that creates lifesaving technologies and interventions, figuring out climate change, and how to solve big issues for the world. It takes many different people from many different life experiences to come together to figure it all out.

That has been the great contribution of American higher education, which is why people are so drawn to the United States. I hope that we can get back to the business of the university and that the university comes out even stronger and even better.

Do you have any interesting projects or professional plans in the works? 

I am working on an encyclopedia of Historically Black Colleges and Universities to tell the stories of each of the HBCUs. I've recruited five editors who are working with me, and we have a team of authors who have been actively involved in this project. We have really positive reviews from our publisher right now, so we're just trying to get to the finish line.

We just completed our inaugural HBCU documentary film festival at Emory this past spring. I received funding from the Provost’s Office some years ago before I left. Crystal Sanders, who's on the faculty now, agreed to lead the project, and we just celebrated the launch of the festival in April. It was such a joy to be back down at Candler to see it all come to fruition. 

How do you balance your personal life and your professional life, and what brings you joy?

There is no balancing this crazy life. I try to spend as much time as I can with my family and friends. That brings me great joy. I also love to cook. I enjoy making a big pot of gumbo and red beans and rice and inviting friends over and fellowshipping. 

AUTHOR

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Deirdre Jonese Auston

Ph.D. student, Cultural Anthropology

Deirdre Jonese Austin is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology, pursuing certificates in African and African American Studies and Feminist Studies. Her research explores how Black women dancers in Black churches and Black-owned pole dance studios in the U.S. South cultivate sacred relationships with their bodies, the divine, and other dancers.