Dana L. Robert
Dana Lee Robert is an historian of Christianity and a missiologist. Since 1984, she has been the Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission, and the director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University. Early life. Robert is a graduate of Louisiana State University (BA) and Yale University (MA, MPhil, and PhD). She worked as a high school history teacher in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1978. In 1982 she became an instructor at Yale University, before moving on to Boston University. In Boston, she was assistant professor from 1984–90, associate  professor from 1990–97, and became full professor in 1997. Robert was formerly married to political figure Bob Massie. Scholarship. In the early 1980s, Dana L. Robert became captivated by what she called "Comparative Christianity." After completing her Ph.D. at Yale University, she began teaching at Boston University where, over the following three decades, she helped build the field that is now known as World Christianity. Robert's scholarship has focused on the role of women in mission history, notably through her "American Women in Mission" (1997), as well as the relationship between mission history and world Christianity more broadly. She  presently serves as one of the editors of the journal "Church History". Dana Robert and M.L. Daneel opened one of the first university-based Centers on World Christianity in North America. In 2010, Dana Robert delivered the keynote address at the Edinburgh 2010 Conference, which marked the centennial of the World Missionary Conference of 1910, speaking on “Witnessing to Christ Today: Mission and Unity in the 'Long View' from 1910 to the 21st Century.” Robert has also given the Henry Martyn Lectures at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide (2010), the Woolsey Lectures in Theology and Culture at Houghton College  (2011), the Wallace Chappell Lectures in Evangelism at Duke Divinity School (2012), the Ausberger Lecture Series at Eastern Mennonite University (2013), the Parchman Endowed Lecture Series at Baylor University (2015), the Donald A. Yerxa History Lecture at Eastern Nazarene College (2016), and the Sprunt Lectures at Union Presbyterian Seminary (2017). Honors. In 2017, Dana Robert received several honors in recognition of her contributions to history, theology, and religious studies. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The American Society of Missiology awarded her with the guild's Lifetime Achievement Award. The Association of Theological Schools named  her a Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology, and she served as a senior research fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. In 2021, a festschrift entitled "Unlikely Friends How God Uses Boundary-Crossing Friendships to Transform the World" was published to honor her scholarship in the fields of missiology and world Christianity on boundary-crossing friendships.