Rosetta E. Ross is a professor of religion at Spelman College. She pioneered scholarly work on religion and Black women’s activism in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and was an early proponent of womanist theology. Her research explores religious meaning in Black women’s social action; the meaning of Black religion; religions in the lives of Africana women; and social ethics.

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She is author of Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights, co-author of The Status of Racial and Ethnic Clergywomen in the United Methodist Church (with Jung Ha Kim), and co-editor of Unraveling and Reweaving Sacred Canon in Africana Womanhood (with Rose Mary Amenga-Etego). In addition to these books, she published more than 40 journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries and delivered lectures and papers nationally and internationally exploring these themes.

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Rosetta is the organizer and was founding board chair of The Daughters of the African Atlantic (www.africanatlanticdaughters.com) which facilitates international, intergenerational, interfaith interrogations of religions’ functions among African-descended women. As an ordained United Methodist Elder, she has mentored women of color entering the religious academy and other religious vocations. At Spelman College, Rosetta re-envisioned religious studies as a curriculum that embraced religious diversity and hired the first two tenure-track faculty to teach Islam and Eastern traditions. Her current research situates Black laywomen’s Civil Rights activism within the tradition of rigorous intellectual discourses and radical practices that define Black religions in the United States.