W&M Featured Events

This calendar presented by William & Mary

[PAST EVENT] "Staying in Place": Lecture by Professor Sarah Barringer Gordon (University of Pennsylvania)

October 17, 2019
12:50pm - 2pm
Location
Law School, Room 119
613 S Henry St
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
Access & Features
  • Open to the public

Sarah Barringer Gordon, Arlin M. Adams Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania,  will present a lecture titled “Staying in Place: Church Property and the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church after the Civil War."  Free admission and all are welcome.

Biography (excerpted from the University of Pennsylvania Law School website)

Sally Gordon is well known for her work on religion in American public life and the law of church and state, especially for the ways that religious liberty developed over the course of American national history. She is a frequent commentator in news media on the constitutional law of religion and debates about religious freedom.  Her current book project is Freedom’s Holy Light: Disestablishment in America, 1776-1876, about the historical relationship between religion, politics, and law. In 2015-16, Gordon was a Guggenheim Fellow, and in fall 2017 will hold the Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress. Gordon is the President-elect of the American Society for Legal History, also serves as co-editor of Studies in Legal History, the book series of the Society.  She serves on the boards of the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation and the McDowell-Hartman Foundation, as well as the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2011, she received the University’s Lindback Award for distinguished teaching and in 2004 and 2009 the Law School’s Robert A. Gorman Award for Teaching Excellence. In 2012, she was appointed a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.  Her first book, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth- Century America (Univ. of North Carolina, 2002), won the Mormon History Association’s and the Utah Historical Society’s best book awards in 2003. Her second book, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Harvard, 2010), explores the world of church and state in the 20th century.