Art Historian Sally M. Promey Accepts Yale Appointments

Martin D. Jean

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Sally M. Promey as Professor of Religion and Visual Culture in the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School, and as Professor of American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, beginning January, 2007. Additionally, Prof. Promey will serve as Deputy Director of the ISM for a three-year, renewable term, assisting in strategic planning, curriculum, and in program development in Religion and Visual Culture, particularly in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and other arts areas at Yale and beyond.

Promey is currently Professor of American Art History and chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland. She holds the Ph.D. in History of Culture from the University of Chicago and the M.Div. from Yale Divinity School and is ordained in the United Church of Christ. Her scholarship explores relations between visual culture and religion in the United States from the colonial period through the present. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete a book titled Religion in Plain View, a history of the public display of religion in the United States. Her Guggenheim work begins in January 2007. Promey's most recently completed monograph, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (Princeton University Press, 1999) received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Historical Study of Religion. Her book Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (Indiana University Press, 1993) was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art and selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book. Among recent articles and book chapters are essays titled "Seeing the Self 'in Frame'": Early New England Material Practice and Puritan Piety," in Material Religion (2005); "Taste Cultures and the Visual Practice of Liberal Protestantism, 1940-1965," in Practicing Protestants: Histories of the Christian Life in America, ed. Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Leigh Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); "Situating Visual Culture," in the Blackwell Companion to American Cultural History, ed. Karen Halttunen (Blackwell, in press); and "The 'Return' of Religion in the Scholarship of American Art," in The Art Bulletin (2003). Promey is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships including a residential fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, two Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowships (1993 and 2003) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, and summer research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Louisville Institute, and the General Research Board of the University of Maryland. She was co-director (with David Morgan, Valparaiso University) of a multi-year interdisciplinary collaborative project, "The Visual Culture of American Religions," funded by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Lilly Endowment Inc. A book sharing the project title and co-edited by Promey and Morgan appeared in 2001 from University of California Press. In 2004 she was Senior Historian in Residence for the Terra Summer Residency Program in Giverny, France. Promey serves on the Advisory Committee of the Archives of American Art, the Editorial Board of Material Religion, and is Editorial Advisor to American Art as well as juror for the College Art Association's Wyeth Foundation Publication Grant in American Art.

Prof. Promey's work is defined by collaboration and multi-disciplinarity. She is a scholar of renown who has a deep interest in the lives and workings of religious communities. One reviewer from a sister institution of Yale commented that he was "envious of Yale for making such an appointment." Indeed, we are fortunate that Prof. Promey will join the Yale faculty, and we are particularly proud to note that this is the first tenured senior appointment to be made to the ISM faculty since 1997, and the first ever fully joint appointment made with a department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Teresa Berger Accepts appointment at the Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School

Martin D. Jean

I am pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Teresa Berger as Professor of Liturgical Studies at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School, beginning January, 2007. She is a renowned scholar with great range and a dedicated and beloved teacher. Since 1985, she has been on the theology faculty of Duke Divinity School.

Teresa Berger holds doctorates in both dogmatic theology and in liturgical studies. Berger grew up in post-World-War II Germany and studied at St. John's College, Nottingham, and the Universities of Mainz, Heidelberg, Muenster, and Geneva. Her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of liturgical studies, gender theory, theology, and cultural studies. Berger has written extensively on liturgy and women's lives. Her recent publications include Women's Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History (1999), Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context (2001), and Fragments of Real Presence (2005). The latter received two Catholic Press Awards in 2006. Berger has also published monographs on the hymns of Charles Wesley, on the 19th-century Anglo-Catholic revival, and on ecumenical readings of the Scriptures. In the spring of 2006, she co-edited an issue of the subaltern web dossier Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, entitled The Poetics of the Sacred and the Politics of Scholarship.

Berger is passionate about teaching, including its cross-cultural dimensions; she has been a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Mainz, Muenster, Berlin, and Uppsala.

In 2003, Teresa Berger received the distinguished Herbert Haag Prize for Freedom in the Church.

Berger's scholarly work currently focuses on an editorial project designed to bring to light the many ways in which gender has shaped what comes to be known as "liturgical tradition."

Berger is also completing a collection of prayers, meditations, stories and songs entitled Ocean Psalms, and is co-producing, with FireStream Media, a documentary video of liturgies in women's hands.

Teresa Berger is part of Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Durham, N.C.

We are overjoyed that Prof. Berger will join our distinguished faculty of Prof. Fassler, Garrigan and Spinks and look forward to the contribution she will make to the Institute and Divinity School communities. Please join me in welcoming her to Yale University