Dr. Emily R. Mace comes to Harvard Square Library with a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University. She is excited to be joining the Cambridge-based staff of the Harvard Square Library in support of a website that has proved helpful for both her research and her teaching. As Director, she plans to continue the work the Rev. Dr. Herb Vetter began in his retirement, offering texts, biographies, and other sources that celebrate the liberal religious tradition. Over the next few months, she hopes to bring a refreshed layout to the website that will also offer integration with social media.

Dr. Mace brings to the Director’s position an academic background and personal interest in religious liberalism, as well as editorial and library experience. At Princeton, Dr. Mace wrote her dissertation, “Cosmopolitan Communions: Practices of Religious Liberalism in America, 1875-1930,” on liberal religious practices in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These practices included rituals of fellowship, congregational dedication ceremonies, seasonal holidays, Sunday school curricula, and the creation of scriptural compilations. Her main academic interests include religious liberalism, religious pluralism and diversity in America, and gender and religion. She teaches religious studies at Brevard College in western North Carolina and also serves as an adjunct instructor in Unitarian Universalist history and polity at Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, CA. She is an active member of the UU Scholars and Friends group that meets every year at the American Academy of Religion’s Annual Meeting.

Prior to studying at Princeton, she received her M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School in 2003, where she participated in HUUMS, the student Unitarian Universalist group. She received her B.A. from Amherst College in 2000. Dr. Mace has lived for four years in the picturesque Western North Carolina mountains with her husband and two-year-old daughter. Not a native to the area, she enjoys much that the region has to offer, especially the beautiful hiking and local bluegrass and folk music.