Deanna Ferree Womack
Biographic Data
| ID | 3675917 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deanna Ferree Womack |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deanna Ferree |
| FAMILY NAME | Womack |
| SIGNATURE | WOMACK D F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-6823-7581 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Martyrs and Migrants
Candace Lukasik’s Martyrs and Migrants is a unique addition to the existing literature on American Copts and Middle Eastern Christian migration. This multisited ethnography of Coptic Orthodox communities in the US (especially Jersey City) and in the Upper Egyptian village of Bahjura elucidates the contemporary politics of migration and the transnational dimensions of Coptic belonging and exclusion. Lukasik argues that diaspora encounters with US …
Muhammad in the Seminary
David Grafton’s Muhammad in the Seminary focuses on the nineteenthcentury as a pivotal period for the formation of American Protestantconceptions about Islam. Grafton identifies theological seminaries as theearliest institutions in North America to provide students with sustainedinstruction on Islam, and he argues that the impact of such educationwas considerable. The book offers a detailed historical investigation ofthe ways that seven Protestan…
Gender in Protestant Re-inventions of Islam from the Reformation to the Enlightenment
Prior to the nineteenth century, Protestant religious leaders participated in the re-invention of Islam. In this context the Ottoman Islamic state—and not Christian Europe—was the dominant political power. The book’s second chapter considers such early Protestant ideas and images of Islam from the sixteenth to early nineteenth century. Beginning with the Reformation in continental Europe, it examines representations of Islam and Muslims in theolo…
Islam Re-invented for Young Readers
This chapter explores how British and American missionaries and mission organizations presented material about Muslims and Islamic societies to children and youth. It focuses first on children’s magazines and educational, non-fiction books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then it examines several works of fiction that women missionaries and mission supporters wrote for children after the 1920s. The chapter analyzes the idea…
Abbreviations
Re-inventing Islam in Missionary Texts
This third chapter attends to the ways in which British and American missionary texts extended and re-invented earlier Protestant discourses for American consumers. In particular, it examines the gender discourses in texts published for adult mission supporters in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since men dominated missionary publishing, this chapter and the next intentionally include the writings of a significant number of women mi…
The Ongoing Effects of Missions
The seventh chapter concludes the book by considering the shifts in missionary thinking after World War II, identifying a new openness which some mainline Anglo-Protestants showed to Islam and Muslim cultures while also still critiquing gendered practices such as veiling. Moreover, this chapter considers the connections between earlier anti-Muslim sentiment among Protestants and contemporary American Islamophobia, a phenomenon that took full form…
Protestant Re-inventions of Islam in Historical Context
Chapter 1 introduces Re-inventing Islam and the following research questions that this book seeks to answer: What ideas did missionary women and men in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Islamic contexts pass on to later generations? How were these ideas connected to centuries-old Protestant discourses about Muslims and gender? And what bearing does this history have on the birth of Islamophobia in the late twentieth century and on efforts f…
Performative Re-inventions
Chapter 6 places the movement for missions to Muslims in the broader context of global Protestant missions and western imperialism. It delves further into the material objects and “curiosities” that missionaries collected and the Islamic costumes they used performatively to draw attention to their work. This chapter considers how missionaries used material culture to reinforce critiques of Islamic gender norms and how they promoted ideas about Mu…
Figures
2.1Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I (1578) 412.2Title page of Cosmographiae Universalis (1550) 434.1“Girls of Turkey” (1864) 1174.2“Paper Doll—A Little Girl from
Recasting the Protestant Gaze
In addition to their published writings, missionaries used items of material culture to educate and elicit support from their constituents at home. This chapter and the next move beyond text-based approaches and examine the colossal archive of missionary images and objects collected from Muslim contexts. This fifth chapter centers on images, including photographs and printed postcards, of Muslims and Islamic rituals that missionaries published, s…
Re-inventing Islam
From the end of the American Civil War to the start of World War II, the Protestant missionary movement unintentionally tilled the soil in which American Islamophobia would eventually take root. Re-inventing Islam explores the deep roots of this recent phenomenon, using gender as a lens and focusing specifically on the historical role of Protestant leaders and missionaries in transmitting ideas about Islam. Looking beyond typical studies of texts…
Christians in and from the Middle East
This article considers the history and contemporary reality of Middle Eastern Christianity in light of new demographic information available from the World Christian Encyclopedia. For readers interested in church history and World Christianity, it identifies key lessons to be learned about Christians in and from the Middle East today. It focuses on understanding the region’s Christian diversity, the complexities of recent demographic decline, the…
Protestant Portrayals of Islam
This study compares Protestant portrayals of Islam during the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation and the nineteenth-century era of imperialism and missions. It considers the earliest Protestant writings about Islam and the views of the first Protestant missionaries who had close personal contact with Muslims. To understand the historical thought patterns that still influence contemporary American Protestant views of Muslims, the article exa…
Christian Communities in the Contemporary Middle East
Who are the Christians of the Middle East? How have churches and Christian organizations responded to violent conflicts, political unrest, refugee flows, and economic crises in the region? Does such socio-political turmoil define Middle Eastern Christians as a group? By what methods do scholars today study Christian communities in the Middle East? This special issue addresses such pertinent questions and contributes to a growing body of scholarsh…
Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria
The Ottoman Syrians - residents of modern Syria and Lebanon during the Ottoman Empire - formed the first Arabic-speaking Evangelical Church in the region. Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria offers a fresh narrative of the encounters of this minority Protestant community with American Presbyterian missionaries, Eastern churches and Muslims at the height of the Nahda (or Arab renaissance), from 1860 to 1915. Drawing …
The Contested Origins of the 1865 Arabic Bible
Syrian Christians and Arab-Islamic Identity
This essay examines the ways that Arab Christian immigrants in the late-nineteenth-century United States understood religious, cultural and national belonging. Focusing on migrants from Ottoman Syria (present day Lebanon and Syria) who referred to themselves as Syrians, it uses publications from the Arab renaissance in Beirut and early Arab American newspapers in New York to consider how these Christians grappled with their identities as subjects…
To Promote the Cause of Christ's Kingdom
This article traces the presence in the Arab world of international Christian student organizations like the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and its intercollegiate branches of the YMCA and YWCA associated with the Protestant missionary movement in nineteenth-century Beirut. There, an American-affiliated branch of the YMCA emerged at Syrian Protestant College in the 1890s, and the Christian women's student movement formed in the early t…
The Contested Origins of the 1865 Arabic Bible
Images of Islam
This article examines the story of Protestant missions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Syria, a region of the Ottoman Empire that included present day Syria and Lebanon. It moves the study of the American Syria Mission away from Euro-centric modes of historiography, first, by adding to the small body of recent scholarship on Arab Protestantism and mission schools in Syria. Second, it focuses on Islam and Christian–Muslim relati…
Revival and Awakening
The Authenticity and Authority of Islam
This paper examines the concept of Islamic authority in relation to early twentieth-century Protestant missionary writings on Islam and Muhammad Rashid Rida’s commentaries on mission publications in his Cairo-based journal, al-Manar . While Rida’s Salafi reformism has been the subject of much discussion, scholars have given little attention to the content of the missionary writings Rida engaged. Treatments of Rida’s work have also neglected to ad…
The Orphan Scandal
A number of recent books have detailed the complexities of the Christian missionary encounter in the modern Middle East, yet few give adequate attention to the ways that Muslim communities responde
Transnational Christianity and Converging Identities
This study of Arabic speaking Protestant churches in New Jersey adds to the limited amount of existing scholarship on Arab American Protestantism and aims to make Arab Christianity a topic of discussion within studies of world Christianity and mission. After considering the historical and demographical data on Arabic speaking churches in the United States, it examines the ecology and culture of five Arabic Protestant churches in New Jersey and id…
Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion
Despite the growing number of publications on Christian missions in the Middle East, no single volume has till now endeavored to provide a comprehensive history of missions in the region that inclu
Protestant Missionaries in the Levant
Samir Khalaf's Protestant Missionaries in the Levant is a welcome addition to the small body of literature on American missionaries in nineteenth-century Ottoman Syria. (In the nineteenth-century c
The Authenticity and Authority of Islam
This paper examines the concept of Islamic authority in relation to early twentieth-century Protestant missionary writings on Islam and Muhammad Rashid Rida’s commentaries on mission publications in his Cairo-based journal, al-Manar . While Rida’s Salafi reformism has been the subject of much discussion, scholars have given little attention to the content of the missionary writings Rida engaged. Treatments of Rida’s work have also neglected to ad…
The Orphan Scandal
A number of recent books have detailed the complexities of the Christian missionary encounter in the modern Middle East, yet few give adequate attention to the ways that Muslim communities responde
Transnational Christianity and Converging Identities
This study of Arabic speaking Protestant churches in New Jersey adds to the limited amount of existing scholarship on Arab American Protestantism and aims to make Arab Christianity a topic of discussion within studies of world Christianity and mission. After considering the historical and demographical data on Arabic speaking churches in the United States, it examines the ecology and culture of five Arabic Protestant churches in New Jersey and id…
Images of Islam
This article examines the story of Protestant missions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Syria, a region of the Ottoman Empire that included present day Syria and Lebanon. It moves the study of the American Syria Mission away from Euro-centric modes of historiography, first, by adding to the small body of recent scholarship on Arab Protestantism and mission schools in Syria. Second, it focuses on Islam and Christian–Muslim relati…
Revival and Awakening
The Contested Origins of the 1865 Arabic Bible
Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria
The Ottoman Syrians - residents of modern Syria and Lebanon during the Ottoman Empire - formed the first Arabic-speaking Evangelical Church in the region. Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria offers a fresh narrative of the encounters of this minority Protestant community with American Presbyterian missionaries, Eastern churches and Muslims at the height of the Nahda (or Arab renaissance), from 1860 to 1915. Drawing …
The Contested Origins of the 1865 Arabic Bible
Syrian Christians and Arab-Islamic Identity
This essay examines the ways that Arab Christian immigrants in the late-nineteenth-century United States understood religious, cultural and national belonging. Focusing on migrants from Ottoman Syria (present day Lebanon and Syria) who referred to themselves as Syrians, it uses publications from the Arab renaissance in Beirut and early Arab American newspapers in New York to consider how these Christians grappled with their identities as subjects…
To Promote the Cause of Christ's Kingdom
This article traces the presence in the Arab world of international Christian student organizations like the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) and its intercollegiate branches of the YMCA and YWCA associated with the Protestant missionary movement in nineteenth-century Beirut. There, an American-affiliated branch of the YMCA emerged at Syrian Protestant College in the 1890s, and the Christian women's student movement formed in the early t…
Christian Communities in the Contemporary Middle East
Who are the Christians of the Middle East? How have churches and Christian organizations responded to violent conflicts, political unrest, refugee flows, and economic crises in the region? Does such socio-political turmoil define Middle Eastern Christians as a group? By what methods do scholars today study Christian communities in the Middle East? This special issue addresses such pertinent questions and contributes to a growing body of scholarsh…
Christians in and from the Middle East
This article considers the history and contemporary reality of Middle Eastern Christianity in light of new demographic information available from the World Christian Encyclopedia. For readers interested in church history and World Christianity, it identifies key lessons to be learned about Christians in and from the Middle East today. It focuses on understanding the region’s Christian diversity, the complexities of recent demographic decline, the…
Protestant Portrayals of Islam
This study compares Protestant portrayals of Islam during the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation and the nineteenth-century era of imperialism and missions. It considers the earliest Protestant writings about Islam and the views of the first Protestant missionaries who had close personal contact with Muslims. To understand the historical thought patterns that still influence contemporary American Protestant views of Muslims, the article exa…
Gender in Protestant Re-inventions of Islam from the Reformation to the Enlightenment
Prior to the nineteenth century, Protestant religious leaders participated in the re-invention of Islam. In this context the Ottoman Islamic state—and not Christian Europe—was the dominant political power. The book’s second chapter considers such early Protestant ideas and images of Islam from the sixteenth to early nineteenth century. Beginning with the Reformation in continental Europe, it examines representations of Islam and Muslims in theolo…
Islam Re-invented for Young Readers
This chapter explores how British and American missionaries and mission organizations presented material about Muslims and Islamic societies to children and youth. It focuses first on children’s magazines and educational, non-fiction books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then it examines several works of fiction that women missionaries and mission supporters wrote for children after the 1920s. The chapter analyzes the idea…
Abbreviations
Re-inventing Islam in Missionary Texts
This third chapter attends to the ways in which British and American missionary texts extended and re-invented earlier Protestant discourses for American consumers. In particular, it examines the gender discourses in texts published for adult mission supporters in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since men dominated missionary publishing, this chapter and the next intentionally include the writings of a significant number of women mi…
The Ongoing Effects of Missions
The seventh chapter concludes the book by considering the shifts in missionary thinking after World War II, identifying a new openness which some mainline Anglo-Protestants showed to Islam and Muslim cultures while also still critiquing gendered practices such as veiling. Moreover, this chapter considers the connections between earlier anti-Muslim sentiment among Protestants and contemporary American Islamophobia, a phenomenon that took full form…
Protestant Re-inventions of Islam in Historical Context
Chapter 1 introduces Re-inventing Islam and the following research questions that this book seeks to answer: What ideas did missionary women and men in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Islamic contexts pass on to later generations? How were these ideas connected to centuries-old Protestant discourses about Muslims and gender? And what bearing does this history have on the birth of Islamophobia in the late twentieth century and on efforts f…
Performative Re-inventions
Chapter 6 places the movement for missions to Muslims in the broader context of global Protestant missions and western imperialism. It delves further into the material objects and “curiosities” that missionaries collected and the Islamic costumes they used performatively to draw attention to their work. This chapter considers how missionaries used material culture to reinforce critiques of Islamic gender norms and how they promoted ideas about Mu…
Figures
2.1Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I (1578) 412.2Title page of Cosmographiae Universalis (1550) 434.1“Girls of Turkey” (1864) 1174.2“Paper Doll—A Little Girl from
Recasting the Protestant Gaze
In addition to their published writings, missionaries used items of material culture to educate and elicit support from their constituents at home. This chapter and the next move beyond text-based approaches and examine the colossal archive of missionary images and objects collected from Muslim contexts. This fifth chapter centers on images, including photographs and printed postcards, of Muslims and Islamic rituals that missionaries published, s…
Re-inventing Islam
From the end of the American Civil War to the start of World War II, the Protestant missionary movement unintentionally tilled the soil in which American Islamophobia would eventually take root. Re-inventing Islam explores the deep roots of this recent phenomenon, using gender as a lens and focusing specifically on the historical role of Protestant leaders and missionaries in transmitting ideas about Islam. Looking beyond typical studies of texts…
History (19 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Religious studies (15 works) · Islamic Studies and History (13 works) · Protestantism (12 works) · Archaeology (11 works) · Historical and Linguistic Studies (11 works) · History (11 works) · Islam (11 works) · Sociology (11 works)