Katharine Gerbner is a historian of religion, race, and freedom. She examines religious practices that have been excluded from traditional definitions of religion and develops multilingual archival strategies to uncover stories that have been marginalized and forgotten. She is the author of Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025) and Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). She is Associate Professor of History and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota.

In addition to her books, Dr. Gerbner is the co-creator of Adga Tome: Damma’s World, From Gbe to Dutch Creole, a collaborative digital project that translates the words of a formerly enslaved African woman for the first time. She has also published articles on Quakers and slavery, race and religion, and archival ethics. Currently, she is researching the history of religious freedom—investigating how labor systems and emerging technologies have transformed definitions of religion and freedom from the First Amendment to the Age of AI.

Dr. Gerbner is dedicated to making historical research accessible, and she has contributed to documentaries, podcasts, and written op-eds to bring her findings to a broad audience. She also works with teachers and schools in Minnesota and beyond, supporting curricular revision and critical media literacy training for History and Social Studies courses. She served as co-chair of Minnesota’s Social Studies Standards Review Committee (2020–2021) and has been the Faculty Coordinator for the US History College-in-the-Schools program since 2022.

Katharine Gerbner grew up in Philadelphia but has come to love the American “North” of Minnesota. She earned her PhD from Harvard University and her BA from Columbia University. At the University of Minnesota, she teaches courses on Early American History, the Early Modern Archive, Theory and Method in the Study of Religion, and Religion, Technology, and Media. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her husband, Sean Blanchet, who runs Revere Auctions, and their three children.