Judith Casselberry is Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, teaching courses in African American religious and cultural studies, with particular attention to gender. Before her Bowdoin appointment, she was an inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University (2008-2009). She has held visiting appointments at Wesleyan University, Barnard College, Vassar College, and New York University. She received the B. of Music from Berklee College of Music (Music Production and Engineering), MA from Wesleyan University (Ethnomusicology), and Ph.D. from Yale University (African American Studies and Anthropology). During 2012-2013, she served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and African American Religions in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School.
Her current ethnography entitled, The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism (Duke University Press, 2017), examines New York religious women’s spiritual, material, social, and organizational work through the lens of labor theories. Recent articles include “The Politics of Righteousness: Race and Gender in Apostolic Pentecostalism” in Transforming Anthropology: the Journal of Black Anthropologists (Vol. 21, No. 1), “Were We Ever Secular?: Interrogating David Brown on Gospel, Blues, and Pop Music,” in Theology, Aesthetics, and Culture: Responses to the Work of David Brown, Robert MacSwain and Taylor Worley, editors (Oxford University Press, 2012), and “Harvesting Souls for Christ: Black Pentecostal Women’s Labor at the Altar,” in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Winter/Spring 2014 (vol. 42, nos. 1 & 2) In addition to research on organized Pentecostalism, she is working on a project examining Grace Jones’ transnational Pentecostal roots and their imprint on her performance aesthetics and identity.
Casselberry’s interest in links between lettered and performed scholarship comes out of an inter-generational love of music and learning, which she folded into a career as an academic and performer. As a vocalist/guitarist, she currently performs with Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely and has enjoyed a career as an international recording artist with Casselberry-DuPreé and JUCA. She has shared stages with Sweet Honey in the Rock, Odetta, Stevie Wonder, Etta James, and Elvis Costello among others. She served as Production Consultant for Radical Harmonies (Dee Mosbacher, director 2002), a documentary about the women’s music cultural movement, and most recently as Executive Producer of The Amazon 35 Project (2010), a multi-media project documenting a political and cultural movement by women of color and their allies within a lesbian feminist cultural movement at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. In 2011, she brought this project to Harvard University as the keynote speaker at the Graduate Music Forum, Department of Music. She served as a consultant for The New Black (Yoruba Richen, director 2013), a documentary that uncovers the complicated relationships between African-American and LGBT civil rights movements and the black church and anti-gay Christian right-wing.