The YDS faculty are a diverse group of scholars and teachers who, through their research and the students they inform and inspire, bring to life the Divinity School’s mission of service to church and world.
New to the faculty in 2021-22 are a pair of tenured professors arriving from Germany and Massachusetts, respectively: Volker Leppin, Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology, and Braxton Shelley, Associate Professor of Music, Sacred Music, and Divinity.
Volker Leppin is a scholar and teacher with a strong research interest in medieval and Reformation studies. He is the author of 20 monographs, the editor or co-editor of 53 books, and the author of more than 300 scholarly articles and chapters, covering a broad set of interests from antiquity to the modern area. He joins the YDS faculty from the University of Tübingen in Germany. Learn more about Volker Leppin here.
Braxton Shelley holds appointments in the Institute of Sacred Music and the Music Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in addition to YDS and will serve as faculty director of a new interdisciplinary Program in Music and the Black Church.
View Braxton Shelley’s sermon at Opening Convocation.
Professor Shelley joins the YDS community from Harvard, where he was Assistant Professor of Music. Shelley has amassed a range and quantity of awards that belie his young age; among them, the 2016 Paul A. Pisk Prize from the American Musicological Society, the 2016 Graduate Student Prize from the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music, and the 2018 Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award from the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities. Learn more about Braxton Shelley here.
A new dean for Academic Affairs: Joyce Ann Mercer ’84 M.Div.
Leppin and Shelley join a renowned faculty with specialties covering such fields as homiletics, Biblical studies, theology, and ethics. Learn more about our professors.