Catherine Brekus is Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School, Chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and an associate member of the Program in American Studies and the Department of History. She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in the history and literature of England and America, and she holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale University.

Her research focuses on the relationship between religion and American culture, with particular emphasis on the history of women, gender, Christianity, and the evangelical movement. Currently, she is writing a book about the relationship between American nationalism and Christianity and co-authoring a biography of Sarah Edwards (1710-1758) with Harry Stout and Ken Minkema.

She is the author of many articles and books, including Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740-1845, which explores the rise of female preaching during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelicalism in Early America, which argues that the evangelical movement emerged in dialogue with the Enlightenment. A companion volume, Sarah Osborn’s Collected Writings, is a critical edition of some of Osborn’s eighteenth-century manuscripts. Brekus is also the editor of The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, a collection of essays that asks how women’s history changes our understanding of American religion, and the co-editor (with W. Clark Gilpin) of American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, an introduction to the multiple forms of Christian expression in the United States.

Brekus has received several awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Henry Luce III Faculty Fellowship in Theology, and a Pew Faculty Fellowship in Religion and American History. Her book Strangers and Pilgrims won the Brewer Prize from the American Society of Church History, and Sarah Osborn’s World won the Aldersgate Prize from Indiana Wesleyan University and the Albert C. Outler Prize from the American Society of Church History. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. In 2014-15 and in 2018-19 she was named the HDS Outstanding Teacher of the Year.