Professor Mary McClintock Fulkerson has received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in Sweden for her outstanding scholarly contributions to the theological study of Christian practices.

McClintock Fulkerson, Ph.D., a professor of theology at Duke Divinity School and faculty member since 1983, attended the Jan. 25 conferment ceremony in Sweden for new honorary doctors and also gave a lecture. At Duke Divinity, she has been the director of the Program in Gender, Theology, and Ministry, and the faculty sponsor of the Duke Divinity Women's Center and also Sacred Worth group, a student organization for LGBT concerns.

The nine faculties of Uppsala University annually select the recipients of the honorary degrees based on their outstanding academic work or efforts promoting research at that university. McClintock Fulkerson and Lejla Demiri, chair of Islamic Doctrine at the University of Tübingen in Germany, were selected by the university’s Faculty of Theology.

In bestowing the honorary degree, Uppsala University stated that in her research McClintock Fulkerson has consistently taken an interest in lived religious practice, with power, sex, race and racialization, functional variations, and diversity having been consistent themes in her work. The university cited her book Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology as an important contribution to feminist theory development about subjectivity, power, and agency.

Among the new honorary doctors this year are not only researchers in fields such as epidemiology, jurisprudence, and astrophysics, but also an op-ed editor, an author, and the translator behind the Swedish witchcraft terminology of the Harry Potter books.