Raboteau is a professor of religion at Princeton University and an expert on the history of religion in America. His lecture will focus on the legacy of theologian and religious scholar Howard Thurman, who demonstrated how the Gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised in his treatise Jesus and the Disinherited. Raboteau is the author of the books Slave Religion: The 'Invisible Institution' in the Antebellum South, which was awarded the National Religious Book Award, and A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History. He has been a professor at Princeton since 1982. From 1992-1993, he served as dean of Princeton's Graduate School. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1977-1982, the Harvard Divinity School in 1974 and Yale University from 1973-1975. Raboteau is a member of the American Academy of Religion, the American Historical Association and the American Studies Association. He also has served on the Executive Committee of the Humanities Council and Program in Humanisitic Studies and on the Board of Directors for the Executive Committee of the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life.
Raboteau earned his bachelor's degree in English from Loyola University in 1964. He holds master's degrees in English from the University of California at Berkeley, in theology from Marquette University, and in philosophy from Yale. He received his doctorate in religious studies from Yale University in 1974.
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