Associate Professor of History of Religions and Interfaith Studies, Emory, Candler School of Theology

The Rev. Dr. Deanna Ferree Womack teaches courses on Christian-Muslim relations, interreligious dialogue, and Middle Eastern Christianity. From 2022 to 2025 she directed Candler’s Master of Arts in Religion and Leadership program, and she served from 2015 to 2020 as director of the Leadership and Multifaith Program (LAMP), established with the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech. Womack came to Candler from Princeton Theological Seminary, where she earned her MDiv, ThM and PhD. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA).

Womack’s research combines commitments to interreligious understanding, Christian-Muslim dialogue, and world Christianity. Her first book, Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria (Edinburgh University Press 2019), explores encounters between American missionaries and Arab residents of Syria and Lebanon in the pre-World War I period. In particular, it uncovers the history of Syrian women writers and preachers who navigated cultural and religious boundaries in their experiences with missionaries. Womack’s second book, Neighbors: Christians and Muslims Building Community (Westminster John Knox Press, 2020) examines the history of Christian-Muslim relations and the practices of interreligious dialogue in the United States today. Her most recent monograph, Re-inventing Islam: Gender and the Protestant Roots of American Islamophobia (Oxford University Press, 2025) looks at history of Protestant discourses about Islam and Muslims through the lens of gender.