Clemson University’s Historic Properties is bringing back its “Brick by Brick: Constructing America’s Identities” speaker series for the second year, featuring authors who will present different perspectives on the history of America’s built environment. In partnership with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and Clemson Annual Giving, the series will feature five events from June 17 to July 29.

The final lecture will be delivered by Dr. Katherine Rohrer.

Dr. Katherine E. Rohrer is an associate professor of history at the University of North Georgia, Dahlonega. She earned her doctorate in history from the University of Georgia under John C. Inscoe. Rohrer’s research and teaching interests explore the intersection of gender and religion during the 19th and early 20th-century South.

Her new book “Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930” will be published by LSU Press in the fall of 2025.

Looking through a gendered lens, “Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930” studies the ways a sizable subset of well-educated white women of the South used evangelical Protestant Christianity as an instrument to expand their intellectual and professional capacities as well as their agency and influence at home and throughout the world. Specifically, it uses female mission work as a looking glass into the religious and cultural values of the American South. In telling this story, “Daughters of Divinity” balances the use of official denominational accounts, records and publications with personal sources, for example, diaries, journals and correspondence. Employing the same chronological span as did pioneering women’s historian Anne Firor Scott in “The Southern Lady,” this study traces both change and continuity in women’s religious identities and experiences from the antebellum period through the 1920s.