Amanda Izzo, Ph.D., associate professor of women and gender studies at Saint Louis University, has been awarded the Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize. The award honors the previous year’s best published essay on the role of women in the history of Christianity.
Amanda Izzo, Ph.D. SLU file photo.
Izzo's winning article, published in the journal Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, is titled “The Homosocial Gospel: Winnifred Wygal and the Women Couples of the Young Women’s Christian Association of the USA.”
“This is an extraordinary career accomplishment," said prize committee chair, Dyron B. Daughrity, Ph.D. who is Dean of Religion and Philosophy at Pepperdine University’s Seaver College. :Of our field’s many articles published and nominated each year, Dr. Izzo’s surfaced as the top article having to do with women in the history of Christianity.”
Izzo's article offers groundbreaking new perspectives on the emergence of “open and affirming” spaces—environments supportive of LGBTQ+ communities and individuals — in Christian religious life. She does this by exploring how female professional workers at the Young Women’s Christian Association understood and navigated same-sex relationships during the twentieth century’s first half, a time of rigid homophobia in the United States.
The article is intended to help scholars reimagine how LGBTQ+ Christians of a century ago sought to carve out space for themselves in U.S. church-related organizations. The article demonstrates how religious faith could function as a vibrant resource, rather than solely an impediment, in quests for religious inclusion of that era.
“I appreciate not only the prize committee’s warm words, but also the opportunity to have carried out this work at SLU," Izzo said. "The Jesuit-inspired intellectual climate of our university makes it an exemplary place to conduct research on how gender and sexuality intersect with religious commitments.”
The award is sponsored by the American Society of Church History (ASCH), an organization founded in 1888 to foster the study of Christianity in all periods and locations. Established in 1989, the Douglass Prize is named for distinguished church historian Jane Dempsey Douglass, the first female president of the ASCH.
