DURHAM — Eboni Marshall Turman, an ordained minister in the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc, has been named director of Duke Divinity School’s office of black church studies and assistant research professor of black church studies.
Divinity school dean Richard Hays announced the appointment of Marshall Turman, who served as an assistant minister of Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City for 10 years. She is the youngest woman to be licensed and ordained by the church, and the second woman to hold a ministerial position in Abyssinian’s 205-year history.
Her primary teaching interests span the breadth of social ethics as a discipline, especially 20th century social ethics and the historical development of American theological liberalism; liberation theology and ethics; sexual ethics; and postcolonial ethics. Her current research interests include womanist/feminist liberation theology and ethics, black church studies, difference theory and W.E.B DuBois.
Marshall Turman has a forthcoming book, Moving the Body: Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation, and is currently working on a second, Prophetic Disruptions: Sexism and the Black Church.
Marshall Turman has taught theology and ethics at Hood Theological Seminary in Salisbury, N.C., and Union Theological Seminary in New York. She will start at Duke on July 1.
More than 100 Baptist students at Duke Divinity are affiliated with the school’s 25-year-old Baptist House of Studies.