When We Were Freshmen: Judson College and the Rise of the New Baptist Woman

USM LAB 108 Gonzales Auditorium

2021/2022 Baird Fellowship Lecture E. Gabrielle Walker, Recipient Gabrielle Walker is a Ph.D. candidate at Southern Miss. Her interest in post-Reconstruction Southern women led to research on elite white women in the Southern Baptist church. Gabrielle's dissertation, “‘If These Walls Could Speak’: Judson College and the New Baptist Woman, 1890-1930,” explores the ways in which Progressive Era ideology made a lasting impact on Southern Baptist white women attending a Southern Baptist college in the Deep South. For some, their collegiate experiences led to their questioning traditional Southern Baptist thought patterns and expansively interpreting religion to fit a modern, scientific worldview. These “new” Baptist women then used conservative Southern religious institutions as a means to reinterpret their position in church and society. Gabrielle has presented at several academic conferences, was the recipient of the 2017 History Department travel award, and is the 2021-22 Center for the Study of the Gulf South's Baird Fellow at USM. Gabrielle works under the direction of Dr. Rebecca Tuuri.