Marla F. Frederick

Marla Faye Frederick is an American ethnographer and scholar, with a focus on the African American religious experience. Her work addresses a range of topics including race, gender, religion and media studies. She became the eighteenth Dean of Harvard Divinity School on January 1, 2024.

Education Frederick earned a BA in English from Spelman College and in 2000, earned a PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University. She was a postdoctorate fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.

Career and service Frederick was an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati.

In the early 2000s and 2010s, Frederick was Assistant Professor of Religion and African-American Studies at Harvard University.

Frederick has served as the President of the Association of Black Anthropologists. Frederick was the president of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in 2021.

On August 24, 2023, Harvard University announced that Frederick would become Dean of Harvard Divinity School on January 1, 2024. Research Frederick's first book Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (University of California Press, 2003), an ethnography of black church women in Halifax County, North Carolina, was praised by reviewers; the review in Contemporary Sociology described it as a work that "puts a human face on so many sociological concepts and categories."

Her first book on the relationship between television and religion was Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global (Stanford University Press, 2015).