Jean Miller Schmidt

Gerald L. Schlessman Professor of Methodist Studies
Professor of Modern Church History (1975-2001)

• B.A., Drew University
• M.A., University of Chicago
• Ph.D., University of Chicago

"Church history helps people to look deeper into their own story, and to see how both their own tradition and the larger past can be an important resource for living in the present and for working toward a more compassionate and just future.

Looking deeper into the history of the church in the modern world, we begin to see people, especially women and people of color, who were always there but who were largely invisible in the earlier histories because their lives and experiences did not seem important."

Coming from Southern Methodist University, Jean Miller Schmidt joined the Iliff faculty in 1975. Her scholarly and teaching interests lie in the area of North American religious history, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of Souls or the Social Order: the Two-Party System in American Protestantism and Grace Sufficient: A History of Women in American Methodism. With Russell E. Richey and Kenneth E. Rowe, she is currently working on a new history of American Methodism.

Dr. Schmidt serves on the United Methodist General Commission on Archives and History and the UM Studies Advisory Committee. She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Kingswood Books and past president of the regional American Academy of Religion and of the Society of Biblical Literature. She has served for six years as a regionally elected member of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Religion (AAR).

Representative courses:

• United Methodist History
• Women in American Religious History
• Religion and Movements of Social Change in America: Social Gospel