Marla Frederick is the John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity and 18th Dean of Harvard Divinity School, the first woman to hold this position in the school’s 207-year history. Prior to this appointment, she served as the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Religion and Culture at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology from 2019 to 2023. She returns to Harvard having served there as a professor of religion and African and African American studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 2003 to 2019.

Frederick is the author and/or co-author of four books and several articles including Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith and Colored Television: American Religion Gone Global. In 2007 she co-authored Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics, which won the Best Book Award for the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Frederick’s ongoing research interests include the study of religion and media, religion and race and the sustainability of black institutions in a “post-racial” world. She is currently curating, alongside five co-editors, an encyclopedia of the histories of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Frederick has served in numerous capacities in her guilds, including as president of the Association of Black Anthropologists and most recently as president of the American Academy of Religion, the world’s largest association of scholars in religious studies and related fields.

A graduate of Spelman College with a Bachelor of Arts in English, Frederick earned her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Duke University. She continued her work as a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion and at the Interdenominational Theological Center’s Office of Black Women in Church and Society.

Tammy L. Kernodle currently holds the rank of University Distinguished Professor of Music at Miami University of Ohio. She is a recognized musician and scholar whose research focuses on African American music, gender studies in music, and race in American popular culture. Her scholarship has appeared in numerous journals, reference books, and anthologies, and has also appeared in numerous award-winning documentaries, including “Mary Lou Williams: The Lady Who Swings the Band,” “Girls in the Band,” and “Miles Davis: The Birth of Cool.”

The author of Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams, Kernodle has written for and consulted with The American Jazz Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Walker Art Center, NPR, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, BBC, Smithsonian Folkways, and Carnegie Hall. Kernodle is the past president of the Society for American Music and currently curates the I Dream a World Festival, multi-year initiative with New World Symphony that celebrates the legacy of Black composers.

Kernodle holds a Bachelor of Music in choral music education and piano from Virginia State University, and a Master of Arts and PhD in music history from Ohio State University.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History emeritus at the University of South Florida. A specialist in the political, social, environmental, and civil rights history of the American South, he has also taught at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University, the University of Chicago, the Florida State University Study Abroad Center in London, and the Universite d’Angers, in France, where he was a Fulbright Lecturer.

He is one of the nation’s leading civil rights historians and the author of several widely acclaimed and prize-winning books, including Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America, and Arthur Ashe, A Life. His most recent book, published in January 2024 as a volume in Yale University Press’s new Black Lives series, is John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community. The 2011 PBS American Experience documentary “Freedom Riders,” based on his book, won three Emmys and a George Peabody Award. He has also served as a consultant for numerous civil rights museums and documentary film projects, including the 2022 PBS American Masters documentary “Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands.”

Arsenault was educated at Princeton University and Brandeis University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1981.