Religious Studies Professor Jennifer Glancy has been selected by the
American Council of Learned Societies as a 2018 ACLS Fellow, one of only 78 professors in the nation to be so honored and the first Le Moyne faculty member in more than 30 years to be named a fellow.
Glancy was chosen for a project titled “Ancient Christian Slavery and Twenty-First Century Debates about What Makes Us Human.”
“This project originated in my work as Le Moyne’s inaugural McDevitt Core Professor, teaching an ambitious interdisciplinary Core Course on ‘the future of being human.’ I learned so much from my students and from colleagues who collaborated with me on the course and a related lecture series,” said Glancy. “In an unexpected way, my current research manages to bring together those teaching interests with my established scholarly expertise on slavery in early Christianity. A year to research and write—I’m thrilled and humbled.”
Glancy was selected by peer reviewers from a pool of nearly 1,150 applicants.
Professors from more than 50 institutions were recognized, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Wellesley, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Brown, NYU, Notre Dame, Fordham, and UC- Berkeley. The award will cover half of Glancy’s salary, enabling her to take a full-year sabbatical in 2018-2019.
“Fellows were selected for their potential to make an original and significant contribution to knowledge, resulting from research on cultures, texts, and
artifacts from antiquity to the present, in contexts around the world,” said Matthew Goldfeder, director of fellowship programs at ACLS. The ACLS Fellowship Program has been supporting scholars across the humanities and humanistic social sciences for more than five decades, and is funded by ACLS’s endowment.
Glancy’s book-in-progress couples analysis of the theme of slavery in selected Christian writings from the first to fourth centuries with assessment of 21st century discourses about what it means to be human. By engaging 21st century debates about what it means to be human, this project reframes discussion of slavery in the ancient churches. At the same time, a focus on troublesome ways that humanity is called into question in ancient references to slavery exposes limitations in contemporary conceptions of the human. Earlier stages of the project were supported by a 2017 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and a 2016-2017 Kircher Senior Researcher Fellowship granted by the Faculty Senate Research and Development Committee.
Joining the Le Moyne faculty in 1990, Glancy is the author of three books and has received multiple awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for both teaching and research. She was the 2004 Catholic Biblical Association Visiting Professor at L’Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. At Le Moyne, Glancy currently holds The Rev. Kevin G. O’Connell, S.J., Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities. A former co-chair of the National Steering Committee for Justice in Jesuit Higher Education, she has been a member of the National Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education and serves on several editorial boards, including Catholic Biblical Quarterly. After completing an Honors degree in Philosophy and English Literature at Swarthmore College, she served in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps before undertaking doctoral studies in New Testament at Columbia University.
In 1987, Le Moyne Philosophy Professor Susan Bordo was named an ACLS Fellow; she now holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities at the University of Kentucky. In 1967, the ACLS awarded a research grant to another philosophy professor from Le Moyne, John McNeill, S.J.