Diagnosing Devotion, Denying Freedom: A Roundtable on Science, Religion, and Race in Judith Weisenfeld’s Black Religion in the Madhouse (NYU Press, 2025)

Judith Weisenfeld’s Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (NYU Press) examines the intersection of race, psychiatry, and US religion.  She proposes that science in the decades after the end of the US Civil War was not a neutral instrument of description; rather, it created objects of knowledge—pathologies, including about religion—that were infused with white supremacism. In this way, this work provides an illuminating look at the ways that religion, race and mental health have also been vectors for delimiting of freedom. Black Religion in the Madhouse creates new terrain for engagement between scholars of the history of science, race, and US religion.  This roundtable draws scholars from a variety of fields and perspectives to shed light on Weisfeld’s work.