The Challenge of Charlottesville: Race, Religion and Public Monuments

M. Shawn Copeland is professor of systematic theology at Boston College. She has also taught at St. Norbert College, Yale University Divinity School, and Marquette University. Copeland is recognized as one of the most important voices drawing attention to issues related to the religious, cultural, and social experience of African American Catholics. She has written more than 100 articles, reviews, and book chapters on such topics as theological anthropology, suffering, freedom, gender, and race. Recent publications include The Subversive Power of Love: The Vision of Henriette Delille and Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race and Being; she is also the principal editor of Uncommon Faithfulness: The Black Catholic Experience. Copeland is a former convener of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium (BCTS), an interdisciplinary learned society of Black Catholic scholars; and a former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA). She received her Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston College.

Patricia DeLeeuw began her career at Boston College in 1979 as an instructor in the Theology Department. At Boston College and at the Weston School of Theology she taught courses on the social and institutional history of Christianity, and she has written on the influence of Gregory the Great in the Middle Ages, early medieval pastoral care, and medieval religious and liturgical art. She has also held appointments as assistant dean of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, associate dean of the Morrissey Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University harassment counselor, and associate dean of faculties. From 1999 until 2017, DeLeeuw served as vice provost for faculties. She earned a B.A. from the University of Detroit, and holds the Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies from the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. In June 2017, DeLeeuw retired from Boston College, after 37 years of dedicated service.

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College and teaches nineteenth-century American history at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. Her early work focused on the transformation of political ideology from the Civil War to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. It examined issues of race, economics, westward expansion, and the construction of the concept of an American middle class. Her history of the Republican Party, To Make Men Free (2014) examines the fundamental tensions in American politics from the time of the Northwest Ordinance to the present. She is currently working on an intellectual history of American politics and a graphic treatment of the Reconstruction Era.

Martin Summers is an associate professor of history and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College, where he regularly teaches courses on gender and sexuality in African American history, medicine and public health in the African diaspora, and the history of masculinity in the U.S. He is currently the director of the African and African Diaspora Studies Program. He has published scholarship on gender and sexuality within the African American community, including a monograph, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930, which was awarded the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch Book Award in 2005. Summers’ current book project, Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s Capital, is a social and cultural history of medicine which focuses on African American patients at Saint Elizabeths Hospital, a federal mental institution in Washington, D.C., from its founding in 1855 to the 1980s.