School welcomes two new faculty members

After serving as the Henry Luce Diversity Fellow in Theological Education at the School of Divinity for the past two years, Derek S. Hicks has been appointed as Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture. His research considers the impact of religion on those engaged in social, cultural, and political struggle. Particularly, he is interested in issues related to religion and race in America, identity formation, religion’s role in social transformation, slave religion, religion and foodways, the body, and the intersection of religion and Hip-Hop culture. His first book, Reclaiming Spirit in the Black Faith Tradition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) identifies religious practices that engage culture – in relation to bodily, political, spiritual, and social restoration – to recalibrate wounded human dignity. Hicks earned his Ph.D. from Rice University and has received awards from the Ford Foundation, the Fund for Theological Education, and the Louisville Institute.  Prior to coming to Wake Forest, he was on the faculty at Lancaster Theological Seminary.

Katherine A. Shaner joins the faculty as Assistant Professor of New Testament and comes to Wake Forest from The General Theological Seminary of The Episcopal Church in New York City.  Her research interests include constructions of race, class, and gender in the New Testament, household religions in the Ancient Mediterranean, and feminist/womanist hermeneutics. She is currently working on a book about slavery in early Christianity using archaeological, literary, and epigraphic materials located in and around the city of Ephesos, where she spent a summer working as an excavation assistant with the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Selcuk, Turkey. Shaner received her Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School and is ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), by whom she was appointed to serve on the Contextual Theologies from the Margins study group of the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches in Christ.

Media Contact: Mark Batten