Death of Dr. Rosemary Skinner Keller

Union Seminary's Professor Emerita of Church History and Former Academic Dean ,Dr. Rosemary Skinner Keller died on June 5, 2008 after a long battle with kidney cancer.

A native of Oklahoma City, Dr. Keller did her undergraduate work at the University of Oklahoma. She held the M.R.E. from Yale Divinity School, the M.A. from Chicago State University, and the Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. Focusing her scholarship on religion and American culture and American women's history, she wrote and edited an impressive list of books, among them one co-edited with Rosemary Radford Ruether titled In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women's Religious Writings.

She was one of the editors of the Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America. The three-volume work, published in 2006 by Indiana University Press, covers the history of women's religious experience in North America over the course of more than four centuries.

When Keller retired from Union in 2004, she and her husband, the Rev. Robert Keller, returned to Chicago. She continued her research as senior scholar at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University - Purdue University, Indianapolis.


For more information, visit the Union Theological Seminary Web site at http://www.utsnyc.edu/.

Though Keller joined Union after my graduation ad though I have not seen her personally as a member of the Union family, I am saddened by her death. We lost a great feminist scholar.

Jacob Thomas