Marla Frederick
Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Anthropology
When she began her undergraduate studies at Spelman College, Marla Frederick had plans to pursue a career in law and politics. An experience she had in the summer of 1993, however, changed her life. “The summer before my senior year at Spelman, I attended the Dana research program at Duke,” explains the Sumter, South Carolina native. “The project was geared toward encouraging minority students to pursue careers in academia; needless to say, it was successful.” That fall, Marla took a course in cultural anthropology taught by Spelman’s then president, Johnetta Cole, and professor Darryl White. “That course inspired my interest in anthropology as a field that would allow me to do not only ‘book’ research, but research that was directly related to working with people,” says Marla. Her senior research project, “African American Women’s Autobiography: Paradigms of Activism” formed the basis for her current research in the field of African American women and spirituality.
Marla admits that, in the beginning, she found graduate school both isolating and “disillusioning”. “I felt that research was essentially disconnected from the lives of the people studied, and that my time was not being used for the greater good,” reflects Marla. “Over the past few years, though, I have come to see the importance of theory and how people can use it to inform the lives of others. It can be a tool to create enormous amounts of distance between those conducting research and those studied; however, if the researcher takes great strides in making herself and her work accessible to others, research can have a profound influence on society.”
These ideas have been the guiding principles in Marla’s work on spirituality and race. While at Duke, Marla has been researching the link between African American women’s spirituality and political activism in the contemporary US South. Through her involvement with the UNC-based North Carolina Public Sphere Project, Marla had the opportunity to examine the impact of economic restructuring on the practice of democracy in Eastern North Carolina. While there, she worked with several grassroots organizations that worked to prevent large intensive hog operations from coming into their area, and with women who were fighting for economic justice. During her interviews with women activists, Marla discovered that several of them “were inspired towards activism based upon their religious beliefs.” Her dissertation focuses on the ways in which spirituality informs women’s experiences in “a raced, classed, and gendered society such as found in the US South.”
A John Hope Franklin Distinguished Teaching Fellow, Marla has worked with professors Karla Holloway, Irene Silverblatt, Lee Baker, Donna Daniels, and Charlie Piot since coming to Duke. Despite her demanding schedule, she still finds time to be involved in church activities such as the Social Justice Ministry and the Young Adult Choir. Marla’s future plans include publishing her dissertation and writing a book on Christianity and race. As she prepares to embark upon the next step of her academic career, the young scholar reveals the spiritual philosophy behind her numerous achievements. “Through God’s tremendous grace,” says Marla, “I continue to learn, grow, and contribute.
(This profile originally appeared in the March 2000 issue of The GRIND.)