Benjamin A. Groth
Assistant Professor of History and Religion
Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow
Rev. Dr. Benjamin Groth is the Assistant Professor of History and Religion and a Louisville Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Claremont School of Theology in Los Angeles, CA. He is also an ordained Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), and serves as the pastor of First Lutheran Church of the Reformation in New Britain, CT.
He holds a PhD in History from Tulane University, a Masters of Sacred Theology from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, a Masters of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, and undergraduate degrees in Piano Performance, English, and Religion from Oberlin College and Conservatory. He previously served as College Chaplain at Berea College in Berea, KY, and as the pastor of Bethlehem Lutheran Church in New Orleans, where he started the Community Table free meal program and an affordable housing project with the Tulane School of Architecture to provide housing for people living with HIV.
Dr. Groth’s research focuses on the intersections of religion, race, and ritual in the Atlantic World and the early Americas. His first book project addresses the role of baptism in the creation of race in the Spanish empire using archives in the Canary Islands, Seville, and New Orleans. His research has been supported through awards and fellowships from the Huntington Library, the American Society of Church History, the John Carter Brown Library, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Historic New Orleans Collection, Trinity Church Wall Street, the Louisville Institute, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the American Catholic Historical Association, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, the American Historical Association, and the Louisiana Historical Association. Dr. Groth’s article “Sacred Legalities: The Indelible and Interconnected Relationship Between Baptism and Race in Spanish New Orleans.” was published in the journal Louisiana History. He has also written articles for 64 Parishes “Encyclopedia of Louisiana History” on topics of New Orleans colonial history including: “Coartación,” “The 1795 Slave Conspiracy at Point Coupee,” “Juan St. Maló,” and “Bernard de Marigny de Mandeville.”
Contact
Email: bgroth@cst.edu
Education
BA, Oberlin College & Conservatory
MDiv, Yale Divinity School
MA, Tulane University
PhD, Tulane University
