ABOUT
Dr. Phillis Isabella Sheppard is a womanist practical theologian, ethnographer, and psychoanalyst. She is the author of two books and currently serves as the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion.
Phillis Isabella Sheppard is a North Easterner of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the rural Finger Lakes region of Upstate New York. Born of two parents from the red clay of Atlanta and Palmetto Georgia, she straddles two regional Black cultural sensibilities.
Raised Roman Catholic, with an appreciation for the multiple spaces in which the Holy, sacred, and spiritual are known. She is an ordained priest with the Association of Roman Catholic Women Priest and commissioned as a Community Chaplain in an Inclusive Catholic Community. She is believes spirituality, social location, gender, race, and sexuality are wonderfully and beautifully intertwined. She is a womanist lesbian and seeks to foster communities where wide welcome, just practices, and deep engagement is the norm, and lifelong formation encouraged. She embodies these commitments in her practice. Dr. Sheppard is the founder of Set-a-Spell: Womanist Spaces for Integrative Transformation.
She is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion. She is also the Inaugural Director of the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements, Vanderbilt University.
She is a womanist practical theologian, ethnographer, and psychoanalyst. She is the author of two books. Her first, Self, Culture and Others in Womanist Practical Theology places Black women’s experience, psychoanalytic self psychology, and cultural analysis in dialogue to articulate a Womanist Practical theology. Her second book, Tilling Sacred Ground: Interiority, Black Women, and Religious Experience examines religious experience and its intertwinement with interiority in social spaces beyond institutions and brick and mortar sites. As such, she examines Black women’s negotiation of race, gender, and sexuality in religious spaces. Her third book, “Poking and Prodding with a Purpose” Womanist Ethnography in Practice and Method, is in process.
Dr. Sheppard began centering Black women's voices and lived experiences in 1987 for her ethnographic study of secrecy in the lives of Black lesbians who were negotiating faith, Black church experience, and sexual identity. She has since researched Black women’s spirituality, vocational narratives, the intersection of religious and cultural experience, and womanist ethnography during the time of pandemic. Her current project is When African—Means Religious too: an ethnography of place, ritual and multi-religious belonging.
Sheppard conceptualized and convenes the Annual Womanist Ethnography Conference at Vanderbilt Divinity School. The conference highlights the methodology, aims, partnerships and characteristics that distinguish womanist ethnography as a field womanist studies.
She publishes widely in practical theology and pastoral psychology journals including Practical Theology, Journal of Pastoral Theology, and Covenant Quarterly, and in peer reviewed volumes on Spirituality and Psychoanalysis. She is a sought-after professor and lecturer.
In 2022, she received the Distinguished Educator Award from the Internal Forum for Psychoanalytic Education. She was awarded a Louisville Faculty Research Grant (2018) and the Randall Mason Research Award (1998, 1999, 2020), in support of her research.
Prior to joining the Vanderbilt faculty, she was Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Psychology at Boston University School of Theology where she was co-director of the Center for Practical Theology, and the former Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at North Park University Theological Seminary where she was the first African American woman to serve on the faculty and the first to earn tenure. She holds the Ph.D. from Chicago Theological Seminary in Theology, Ethics and the Human Sciences, the M.A. in Theology from Colgate Rochester Divinity School, and earned a certificate from the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in Adult Psychoanalysis.
Sheppard is Chair of the Religion, Psychology, and Culture area, Vanderbilt University Divinity School; Previously served as a Co-Director of the Center for Practical Theology, and Chair of Spiritual Life Committee at Boston University School of Theology.
