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Ellen Armour

E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Religion, Gender and Sexuality
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Professor of Feminist Theology
Director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality   

Ellen T. Armour is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Professor of Feminist Theology at Vanderbilt Divinity School (and Graduate Department of Religion) where she directs the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. She holds affiliated appointments in the Department of Philosophy and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Vanderbilt and was a Faculty Fellow at the Robert Penn Warran Center for the Humanities in 2017-18. Her research interests are in feminist theology, contemporary continental philosophy, and theories of sexuality, race, gender, disability and embodiment. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author of Signs and Wonders: Theology After Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2016), Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem Of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) and co-editor of Bodily Citations: Judith Butler and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2006). Her latest book (forthcoming from Columbia University Press) is entitled Seeing And Believing: Religion, Digital Visual Culture, and the Struggle for Social Justice.

 

Dr. Armour received her BA in Humanities from Stetson University, her M.A. and PhD from Vanderbilt University. She began her teaching career at Rhodes College in Memphis in 1991. While at Rhodes, she served as chair of the religious studies department and of several major faculty committees. She was honored to receive the Clarence Day Dean’s Award for Outstanding Teaching (1999) and the Jameson Jones Award for Faculty Service (2005). She joined the Vanderbilt faculty in the fall of 2006 and became the Director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender and Sexuality in 2007. Armour has served in various leadership roles during her time at Vanderbilt and became the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the fall of 2019.