Guest Lecture by Ingie Hovland

The language of the Bible is a powerful lens through which many Protestants understand themselves and their world, and its prohibitions on women’s speech pose complicated challenges to women. Nevertheless, women frequently serve as vocal leaders in Protestant organizations, including the early twentieth-century Norwegian Mission Society.

In her book Life in Language: Mission Feminists and the Emergence of a New Protestant Subject, Ingie Hovland offers a unique biography of Henny Dons, a leader of the society’s so-called mission feminists, that grapples with ways Protestant women crafted innovative, expansive self-understandings through Christian language. More than their male peers, the mission feminists turned to religious speech to express material, as well as heavenly, desires for paid work, voting rights, and more, and Hovland argues that these experiments in women speaking, reading, writing, and listening paved the way for a new way of being in the world.

Ingie Hovland is a cultural and historical anthropologist of religion. She is especially interested in the many different histories, cultural practices, and social effects of Christianity in the world. Her work uses lenses from feminist theory and material religion studies to trace the interplay of gendered bodies, spaces, and words in particular social situations.

Hovland is Assistant Professor, Associate Department Head, and Director of Graduate Studies at University of Georgia.

Retief Müller, professor in World Christianity at VID Specialized University, will comment on Ingie Hovland’s lecture.

Organizer: RetinC - research on the Intercultural History of Christianity

Contact person

Kristin Fjelde Tjelle