Lynne Gerber, Visiting Scholar at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School will deliver this special lecture. Lynne’s research focuses on the first two decades of the AIDS epidemic and the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, a gay/lesbian congregation that engaged AIDS as a religious issue.
Lynne Gerber’s research interests focus on religion, morality, and the body in American Christianities. She is interested in the moral construction of health and illness and the ways religious communities participate in that construction. She is also interested in how bodies and bodily desires are given moral meaning and how that moral meaning shapes social and cultural life.
Gerber’s first book, Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America (University of Chicago Press, 2011), compared efforts at containing the body and bodily desire in two evangelical parachurch organizations: a Christian weight loss program and a network of “ex-gay” ministries. She has also written on critical approaches to body size, gender in contemporary evangelicalism, religion and social class, and feminist research methods. Her current research is focused on religious responses to HIV/AIDS in San Francisco from 1980–2000.