Professor Emerita of the Sociology of Religion
Boston University
Dr. Ammerman is Professor Emerita at Boston University. Her most recent research has focused on everyday lived religion across a wide religious and geographic spectrum, including working with Grace Davie (University of Exeter) to coordinate an international team of scholars to assess “Religions and Social Progress” for the International Panel on Social Progress. Her latest book is Studying Lived Religion: Contexts and Practices (2021).
Earlier in her career, Dr. Ammerman spent many years studying congregations. Her 2005 book, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and their Partners (University of California Press) describes how America’s diverse congregations do their work. It was awarded the Distinguished Book award by the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association. It followed her 1997 book, Congregation and Community, which analyzes twenty-three congregations that encountered various forms of neighborhood change in communities around the country.
Her first book, in 1987, was Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World, a study of an independent Baptist church in New England, exploring the way in which its members make sense of their lives. Attention to resurgent conservatism continued with Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention, which received the 1992 Distinguished Book award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. There she provided an historical and sociological account of the divisions that faced America’s largest denomination. She also contributed sections on Christian movements for the volumes of “The Fundamentalism Project” of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Nancy was the 2004-05 President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, the 2000-01 Chair of the Religion Section of the American Sociological Association, and the 1995-96 President of the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Before moving to Boston University in 2003, she taught at Emory University (1984-1995) and Hartford Institute for Religion Research (1995-2003). She received the PhD degree from Yale University in 1983 and an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in 2020.