Jennifer Rycenga

Jennifer Rycenga is Professor Emerita of Comparative Religious Studies at San José State University. Her areas of interest include American religious history, religion and music, feminist analyses of religion, lesbian history, religion and politics, and feminist analyses of music. Her co-edited volume of the writings of feminist Mary Daly, The Mary Daly Reader, with Linda Barufaldi, was published in December 2016 by New York University Press. She has published numerous articles, and co-edited the volumes Frontline Feminisms with Marguerite Waller (Routledge, 2000), and Queering the Popular Pitch with Sheila Whiteley (Routledge, 2006). Her cultural biography of white Abolitionist educator Prudence Crandall (1803-1890) and her Black students, Schooling the Nation, is set for publication in 2024. A related project, The Unionist Unified, reconstructs the Unionist newspaper that was published in support of Crandall's efforts. This Digital Humanities project was a collaboration with Library faculty Nick Szydlowski. Link provided below.

She received the Ph.D. in the area of Religion and Music from the Graduate Theological Union and the University of California at Berkeley in 1992. She taught at SJSU from 1995 to 2023.