Kathryn Gin Lum

Kathryn Gin Lum is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department, in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and History (by courtesy) at Stanford. She is also Assistant Professor by courtesy, of History and affiliated with American Studies and Asian American Studies. Her teaching and research focus on the lived ramifications of religious beliefs; she specializes in the history of religion and race in America.

Professor Gin Lum’s first book, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2014), asks how widespread belief in hell influenced Americans’ perceptions of themselves and the rest of the world in the first century of nationhood. Her second book project, a co-edited volume (with Paul Harvey), is The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (forthcoming, Oxford University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled The Heathen World and America’s Humanitarian Impulse, under contract with Harvard University Press.

Professor Gin Lum received her B.A. in History from Stanford and her Ph.D. in History from Yale. She is the recipient of the Annenberg Faculty Fellowship, awarded to outstanding junior faculty (2012-14; renewed for 2017-19), and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Humanities and Sciences, First Years of Teaching (2016-17). She regularly teaches courses like “Exploring American Religious History,” “Constructing Race and Religion in America,” “Religion and War in America,” and “Is Stanford a Religion?” 

Professor Gin Lum joined Stanford as part of the Faculty Development Initiative in 2012.